Yahoo-Kimo Inc’s (雅虎奇摩) online shopping business defied the economic slowdown with annual 30 percent growth in revenue from January through last month, a company official said yesterday.
“This is a huge departure from what is happening out there in the brick-and-mortar retail sphere,” Yahoo Taiwan general manager Charlene Hung (洪小玲) said.
Sagging equity prices in recent months have dragged down consumer confidence and hurt the overall retail sector. The latest retail sales figures, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said, showed a downward trend starting in June.
Retail sales dropped 1.86 percent year-on-year to NT$266.4 billion (US$8.22 billion) in August, following a decline of 4.66 percent in July and a drop of 0.39 percent in June, the ministry reported on Sept. 22. For the first eight months of the year, the accrued retail sales were NT$2.18 trillion, a slight growth of 1.30 percent from the same period last year, ministry data showed.
But e-commerce appeared to be a safe haven from an otherwise bleak shopping environment.
Jacky Wang (王志仁), project vice president of the product department at Monday Technology Co (興奇科技), said online shopping was the No. 4 shopping outlet in Taiwan, ahead of department stores. The top three shopping channels are convenience stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets, Wang said.
Monday Technology, an e-commerce Web site, merged with Yahoo-Kimo in August.
Unlike other retail channels, online shopping enjoys advantages such as 24 hour operations, complete inventory, no weather restrictions and big discounts, as well as various reward programs like free shipping, free returns, bonus points and volume sales, Hung said.
Research by Yahoo-Kimo showed that the strongest online sales occurred between 9:30pm and 2am. These four-and-a-half hours make up 30 percent of the site’s online revenue. The second wave of online shopping occurs on weekdays when people are in the office, while the third is on typhoon days, of which there were many this year, Hung said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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