The 2009 Taipei Tourism Exposition could attract as many as 150,000 visitors and generate NT$100 million (US$3.29 million) in revenue, as the influx of cross-strait tourists is expected to provide a substantial boost to the show’s business opportunities, organizers said yesterday.
Formerly called the Taiwan Tourism Exposition, the annual trade fair held every May attracted 85,000 visitors and tens of millions of dollars in business transactions this year by selling tour products and travel services such as “passport tickets” for package tours that included hotel reservations and tour bus fares to travelers who wish to tour Taiwan or other destinations.
“The opening to more inbound Chinese tourists is expected to create more business for the fair as well as for local travel agencies,” said Peter Ying, assistant chairman of the Taipei Association of Travel Agents (TATA), the organizer of the event, at a prelaunch press conference yesterday.
As part of his pledge to improve economic ties across the Strait, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has agreed to allow more Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan, which, along with the cross-strait weekend direct charter flights launched on July 4, is expected to bring an estimated US$1.87 billion to Taiwan in tourism revenue every year.
TATA said that the size, attendance and number of exhibitors at next year’s show could double.
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