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Cold spurs sales of electrical goods

Sales of electrical appliances have soared in the last two weeks as temperatures plummeted, local hypermarket chains said yesterday.

"Sales of Carrefour's [家樂福] dehumidifiers and disposable heating pads have increased nearly six-fold year-on-year over the last two weeks, while heater sales jumped between four and five-fold compared with the same period a year ago," Dream Lin (林夢紹), Carrefour Taiwan's public relations manager, said by telephone yesterday.

"Medium-to-low-priced electrical appliances are still among customers' favorites. The best-selling heaters at Carrefour range between NT$1,000 and NT$2,000, while dehumidifiers with prices around NT$5,000 are the most popular," Lin said.

Customers have also been looking into the safety specifications of electrical appliances, not just their prices, Lin said.

In addition to the increasing sales of electrical appliances and heating pads, demand for warm clothing is on the rise as well.

"RT-Mart has sold more than 100,000 sweat shirts, pairs of pants and socks this winter, up two to three times compared with a year ago," Margery Ho (何默真), a public relations assistant manager at RT-Mart International Ltd (大潤發), said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Sales of heating pads at RT-Mart have doubled to 400,000 over the last two months from a year ago, Ho said.

The most popular heaters this year are carbon-fiber heaters and oil heaters.

"Carbon-fiber heaters, which take up less space and have a heating spectrum that is more easily absorbed by the human body, have become increasingly popular over the last two years," Ho said, adding that models costing between NT$2,000 and NT$3,000 were RT-Mart's best sellers.

Oil heaters, which in the past were mostly imported from foreign manufacturers, have seen a drop in prices, with locally produced oil heaters being on average 30 percent cheaper than imported models, Ho said.

Carrefour Taiwan, the nation's biggest hypermarket chain, has 48 stores nationwide, while RT-Mart, the second-largest player in the market, has a total of 23 stores.
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