Commercial property deals closed last year grew 6 percent annually to total NT$100.26 billion (US$3.15 billion) — the second-highest in the past five years after 2007’s NT$119.3 billion — real-estate adviser DTZ (戴德梁行) said yesterday.
Local life insurers were the biggest buyers, injecting a total capital of NT$65.6 billion in the acquisition of commercial properties, or 65 percent of the market size last year, the realtor said.
The Shin Kong Mitsukoshi A11 department store building topped all other transactions last year, closed at NT$11.6 billion by the life insurer of Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控), followed by Asia Plaza’s (亞太經貿廣場) three office complexes at NT$11.5 billion, closed by Shin Kong Life Insurance Co (新光人壽).
“Commercial property and luxury residential markets in great locations will continue their upward momentum this year after Chinese investors are allowed in,” the realtor’s general manager Billy Yen (顏炳立) told a media briefing yesterday.
Without elaborating, Yen said that individual Chinese investors have been shopping for local properties.
“Money has been lining up to acquire properties at great locations,” he said.
Properties in Taipei County will also benefit from closer ties with China, he said.
In the office rental market, the vacancy rate of grade-A offices in Taipei slightly declined to 11.6 percent last quarter while rentals averaged NT$2,310 per ping (3.2m²), the realtor’s survey showed.
The rental of grade-A offices in upscale Xinyi District (信義) slightly climbed to average at NT$2,780 per ping last quarter while that in four other business districts in Taipei remained flat, it said.
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