Shin Kong Life Insurance Co (新光人壽) said yesterday it had signed an agreement with My Humble House Hospitality Management Consulting Co (寒舍餐旅管理顧問) to operate a five-star hotel to be built on the A12 lot in the Xinyi District.
Shin Kong, the nation's second-largest life insurer after Cathay Life Insurance Co (國泰人壽), will build an office and hotel complex on a 2,953 ping (9,745m2) piece of land located on Xinyi Road Sec. 4, a company release said yesterday.
The building, with a floor space of 24,000 ping, should be completed in mid-2010, the company said. In December Shin Kong said that it expected construction would finish by the end of 2009.
The hotel will have more than 200 rooms, along with banquet rooms, gyms, restaurants and other facilities, Shin Kong said.
SHERATON EXPERIENCE
Shin Kong Life appeared confident that My Humble House will be able to manage the hotel. It said the firm, which also runs Sheraton Taipei Hotel, posted a more than 10 percent increase in revenues for the first six months year-on-year.
The Sheraton will generate NT$2.2 billion (US$67.5 million) in revenue by the end of this year, the release said.
Multinational companies and foreign financial institutions will be targeted as tenants for the 21-story office building.
The life insurer bought A12, a government-owned land plot, in 2003 through a public bidding process for NT$3.69 billion, or NT$1.25 million per ping.
REAL ESTATE DEALS
Shin Kong has been making large land purchases in recent years.
In March of last year, it spent NT$6.34 billion, or NT$2.74 million per ping, on two residential parcels of state-owned land in downtown Taipei to develop into upscale apartments.
In July, it bought two office buildings from BenQ Corp (
Shin Kong and My Humble House first announced their possible collaboration on the Xinyi project late last year and inked a memorandum of understanding on Dec. 21.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained