Grand Hall Enterprise Co (關中), a supplier and creditor of Barbeques Galore Inc, will offer US$12 million for stores of the bankrupt US retailer.
Grand Hall is bidding for as many as 42 of Barbeques Galore’s 65 stores in a Sept. 3 to Sept. 15 auction, the Taipei-based company said in a stock exchange filing yesterday.
Carlsbad, California-based Barbeques Galore, the world’s largest specialty retailer of barbecues and accessories, filed for bankruptcy in the US on Aug. 15. Grand Hall said last month that it wrote off US$5.4 million in receivables, or 7 percent of assets, because of the bankruptcy.
“It’s not the best timing to buy a retailer of non-essential daily goods,” said Robyn Hsu (�?�), who helps manage US$4.9 billion in funds at Capital Investment Trust Corp (群益投信).
Grand Hall’s stock fell 3.9 percent to NT$12.40 in Taipei, its lowest since listing on Taiwan’s over-the-counter exchange on Jan. 20, 2003.
Bidders can make offers for the inventory of Barbeques Galore’s 65 stores and warehouse as well as for intellectual property and store leases.
Barbeques Galore said it would sell the company or form “a consensual liquidating plan” with bank lenders. The drop in home sales helped push the company into bankruptcy, chief executive officer Jeffrey Sears said at the time.
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