With current stores showing little or no growth, Starbucks will adopt a conservative approach to store openings in Taiwan this year, the company said yesterday.
President Starbucks Coffee Corp (統一星巴克), the operator of the Starbucks coffee chain in Taiwan, has no plan to lower its prices in Taiwan, Amy Luan (欒美雲), a company public relations specialist, said.
Company earnings grew 33 percent last year from a year ago, with revenues rising 10 percent. Sales at stores that had been opened for at least a year rose 4 percent from the previous year, reversing a decline of between 3 percent and 5 percent in years 2006 and 2007, Luan said.
She did not provide earnings and revenues in dollar terms.
The country faces its most serious economic crisis since 2001, which has prompted many local fast-food restaurants to drastically cut their prices to attract customers.
McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast-food chain, on Feb. 4 cut prices for value meals purchased during lunch hours by as much as 25 percent, while rival KFC offered a 50 percent discount on second meals. The KFC offer began on Monday and will last through March 22.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained