Wellcome Taiwan Co (
With most of its Wellcome stores categorized as standard, or medium-sized, stores, the firm is developing a smaller design, called "Express Fresh," requiring only around 80 ping (264m2).
While each standard store requires around 2,000 households to support its business, the new "convenient value supermarket," as the firm describes it, only requires 800 to 1,200 households.
"The innovation is necessary as hypermarkets and convenience stores continue with their aggressive expansion, squeezing the supermarket sector's survival space," chief executive officer Howard Tsai (
"The public's consumption patterns have also changed as the birth rate has dramatically dropped and small families become the mainstream," he said.
Aimed at providing consumers with convenient locations to purchase fresh foodstuffs and daily necessities, Wellcome Taiwan started brewing the Express Fresh concept in September last year and the first outlet was opened in Sindian (
It is expected to open the 7th store of this kind today, bringing its total number of stores to 188 nationwide, including 179 Wellcome stores, five Jason's Market Place stores and four Wellcome Gourmet stores.
Tsai said the new format has proved a cost-effective model that performs well, especially as acquiring larger locales gets increasingly difficult.
The Express Fresh model on average generates sales of between NT$4.5 million (US$135,200) and NT$5 million a month, compared with NT$7 million seen in standard stores, he said.
But the cost, including rent, personnel and hardware, is only half that of mid-sized outlets, he said.
By the end of the year, the firm hopes to add another 40 to 50 stores of the Express Fresh model, although it may also expand standard-sized supermarkets.
Wellcome Taiwan, founded in 1987 by Hong Kong's Dairy Farm Co (
When the retail market was affected by the consumer credit abuse storm last year, Wellcome Taiwan saw the performance of its stores dwindle as shopper traffic slowed.
Ministry of Economic Affairs statistics showed the supermarket sector
recorded revenues of NT$88.5 billion last year, up by 1.93 percent from the
previous year.
The sector is headed by Pxmart (全聯社), the nation's biggest “hard
discounter” better known as Chuan Lian Center (全聯福利中心), with over 300
stores.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
RSS