Three-year-old PC Home Online Inc (網路家庭) celebrated the opening of its 5,000th virtual store yesterday on its business-to-consumer (B2C) portal at a company event yesterday in Taipei.
The nation’s second-largest e-commerce site now earns more than NT$600 million (US$18.23 million) a month, in sharp contrast to its first month in October 2005 when it made just NT$60,000.
Company chairman Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志) said yesterday that he wants to see monthly revenue top NT$10 billion and virtual stores grow from 5,000 now to 10,000 by the end of next year.
Jan said there are three major e-commerce models: Amazon’s, a large-scale B2C retailer; eBay’s, a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platform featuring an overwhelming amount of product volume, and Rakuten’s (樂天), a Japanese model that focuses on individual stores.
Rakuten exposes consumers to individual stores before they are exposed to merchandise, so it mimics the experience of actually shopping in a brick-and-mortar world.
“What is unique about Taiwan’s e-commerce environment is that we are the only country in the world that has all three models coexisting happily together. In the US, Amazon and eBay models dominate the market, whereas in Asia, the Rakuten model is appears to be the popular choice,” Jan said.
Despite declining retail figures from traditional channels such as convenience stores, hypermarkets and department stores, Jan cited a recent Market Intelligence Center (資訊市場情報中心) report that said the country’s e-commerce market grew 30 percent from last year and is expected to grow 31 percent next year.
“So right now is the perfect time to embark in this rapidly growing industry,” Jan said.
“PC Home is the ideal platform for small and mid-size business owners to find a new sales channel, and to be exposed to a massive number of customers who would otherwise never appear in front of their store,” he said.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are limited by their brand names, or lack of brand names, he said, and they suffer from a lack of capital, small number of customers, lack of experience, store presence and unpopular locations. But on the Internet, the game is reversed, he said.
“On PC Home, you can be bigger than SOGO or 7-Eleven because the online platform allows you to build a new identity purely catered to your clientele and add value to your clients directly,” he said.
In the last two years, PC Home has offered groundbreaking features to its members, such as 24- hour guaranteed delivery, local convenience store pick-up, Web ATM, personal delivery and online cash credits.
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
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”