Local retailers yesterday said sales spiked on Sunday as consumers spent their newly claimed vouchers on basic necessities and home appliances ahead of the Lunar New Year holidays.
“Sales on Sunday hit a new record high,” said Margery Ho (何默真), a spokeswoman for RT-Mart (大潤發). “Local consumers have been quite cautious about spending this year. We hope this positive sentiment will fuel a Lunar New Year holiday buying spree.”
Daily sales at RT-Mart’s local outlets on Sunday averaged more than NT$20 million (US$597,000), about 30 percent higher than the same period last year, Ho said.
Basic necessities, food and home appliances were the top-selling items, Ho said.
At Carrefour Corp Taiwan (家樂福), sales on Sunday alone doubled compared with the same period last year, spokesman Savana Tsai (戴幸芳) said.
However, the nation’s largest hypermarket operator declined to comment on a local TV station’s report that daily sales reached NT$600 million.
Tsann Kuen Enterprise Co (燦坤實業), the nation’s largest consumer electronics retailer, said that sales were estimated to have exceeded NT$450 million on Sunday.
But Tsann Kuen said the boost from consumer vouchers could be short-lived, adding that sales for the season could still drop 20 percent compared with last year.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS