Ctrip.com (CTrip, 攜程旅行網), China’s biggest online travel agency, owns more than 50 percent of shares in its Taiwanese counterpart, ezTravel (台灣易遊網), much to the surprise of ezTravel’s president, a company official said yesterday, confirming reports carried earlier yesterday by local media.
“As ezTravel is Taiwan’s premier brand, going forward, ezTravel’s branding, operations and management shall remain the same,” said the official, who declined to be named.
This marks a foray into Internet travel collaboration across the Taiwan Strait. To mark the milestone, the official said ezTravel would follow in Ctrip’s footsteps to release weekly promotions every Wednesday at 3pm for 70 percent discounts on trips in China.
The state-run Central News Agency reported that Ctrip has been investing in ezTravel since 2006, when it had a 20 percent holding. In a three-year period, the NASDAQ-listed Chinese company has acquired more than 50 percent control of ezTravel.
“While we were aware that Ctrip had been buying our shares in bulk, we did not know the magnitude of Ctrip’s actual holdings until Wednesday,” the CNA quoted ezTravel president Jack Yu (游金章) as saying.
Yu said both firms share mutual respect and dismissed rumors that Ctrip would deploy its employees to ezTravel in the immediate future.
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