Quality staff, technology utilization and innovative products are some of the ingredients that make a franchise business successful, pundits told a forum yesterday.
Most chain stores are in the labor-intensive services industry, and the companies should invest in educational training programs and offer good incentives to nurture and retain high-quality staff, said Hsu Yin-Chieh (許英傑), a marketing and distribution management professor from National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology.
He made the remarks at a forum held in conjunction with the 2009 Taiwan Chain Store Fair.
“Employees should be passionate about what they do ... these are the front-line staff going out there to face customers every day,” he said.
Joseph Lo (羅榮岳), president of Shui-Mu International Co (阿瘦實業), agreed that personnel are the driving force to create robust sales for his company — famed for its high-quality footwear bearing the “Aso” brand.
Around 97 percent of 1,000 employees at Shui-Mu are females and the average age of staff is 27. Boosting staff morale is the key to hitting the company’s revenue target, he said.
A survey of their workforce found they hoped to get a Louis Vuitton bag or travel around the world as incentives.
And Shui-Mu has heard their voices.
“We need to retain quality staff with these incentives, so that our end products and services will be high-quality,” Lo said.
Meanwhile, using technology to market products is equally critical in reaching out to Internet-savvy buyers.
Starbucks is a great example of how a franchise business uses social networking media to garner users’ feedback for improvement, Jessica Yang (楊惠雯), deputy director of the Institute for Information Industry (資策會) said.
The coffee chain has not only set up its own site for customers to interact on, but also has a presence on Facebook and Twitter, with huge numbers of customers using those sites, she said.
“Starbucks can gain instant feedback from consumers, good or bad, and this enables it to fine-tune business strategies accordingly,” Yang said.
The Taiwan Chain Store Fair opened at Taipei World Trade Center Hall 1 yesterday and will run through next Monday.
Organized by the Association of Chain and Franchise Promotion (台灣連鎖及加盟協會), the fair gathers 85 chain store operators at a total of 220 booths and is expected to draw 150,000 visitors.
Big names at the event include children’s garment retailer Les Enphants Co (麗嬰房), breakfast store operators My Warm Day (麥味登) and Laguardia (拉亞漢堡), and convenience store operators President Chain Store Corp’s (統一超商) 7-Eleven and Taiwan FamilyMart Co (全家便利商店).
Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Liang Kuo-hsin (梁國新) said during a speech at the opening ceremony that small and medium-sized businesses and the service industry would contribute to Taiwan’s GDP growth of 3.9 percent next year.
The prosperity of the chain store sector would boost the economy, especially with service industries now contributing around 73 percent of the nation’s GDP, the minister said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to