MasterCard Worldwide yesterday launched its annual promotion campaign in Taipei, providing cardholders with shopping benefits at 100 retail outlets in the city until the end of August.
Although this year’s Taipei MasterCard promotion is targeted at tourists from China, the promotional discounts and benefits are available to its cardholders worldwide, Tina Chiang (江威娜), a senior vice president who oversees MasterCard Worldwide’s operations in the greater China region, told a media briefing yesterday.
Nine department stores, 77 restaurants and 14 hotels in Taipei are taking part in the campaign, representing a 14 percent increase in the number of participating outlets compared with last year.
Cardholders who spend more than NT$6,000 (US$197) in a MasterCard transaction will receive vouchers to three restaurants, the company said.
Once the nation’s financial regulator allows Chinese tourists to use their debit cards or China Unionpay ATM cards (中國銀聯卡) in Taiwan, it is expected that they will reduce their MasterCard spending.
Chiang yesterday shrugged off such concerns and expressed confidence in MasterCard.
She questioned how convenient it would be to use China Unionpay cards in Taiwan, saying that the card required a new PIN code for each transaction, which could spell difficulty for Taiwanese retailers.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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