Following its acquisition by the Far Eastern Group (遠東集團) early last year, Far Eastern Geant (愛買吉安) is aggressively expanding to demonstrate its commitment to the domestic market.
The nation's third-largest hypermarket chain expects to add at least one new store per year to its existing 14 outlets nationwide to strengthen its economies of scale, company president Pascal Billaud told reporters yesterday.
It also plans to remodel some of the stores to boost its image and provide a pleasant shopping environment, he added.
These new projects are being backed by its parent company, Far Eastern Department Stores Ltd (
Last September, French retailer Casino Guichard-Perrachon SA sold its 50 percent holding -- worth NT$738 million -- in Far Eastern Geant to Far Eastern Department Stores following its decision to exit the local market and focus on emerging markets such as Brazil and Thailand in search of faster sales growth.
Far Eastern Geant posted sales of more than NT$13 billion last year, up 11 percent from 2005, Billaud said. The company remained in the red, however.
He made the remarks during a press briefing in Taichung after the reopening ceremony for the company's Chungkang (中港) store, whose one-year refurbishment project cost millions of NT dollars.
Customer response to the remodeling of the Taichung store has been positive, the firm said, with sales last month jumping 50 percent from the same period last year.
The company this year plans to strengthen its private label product mix and offer a better range of household appliances, marketing director Fiona Wang (
By integrating the group's resources, the Far Eastern Group is also building an online store to lure Internet-savvy consumers, who can order products from the hypermarket. The electronic platform will be formally launched in a few months, Billaud said.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
RSS