The nation’s six-star hotel The Lalu (涵碧樓) will soon expand into more than 10 Chinese cities, including Qingdao, Guilin, Nanjing and Suzhou, the hotel’s chairman Lai Cheng-i (賴正鎰) said.
“In the next five years, our revenues from Chinese businesses will outperform those made from the local market,” Lai, who is also chairman of the Taichung-based real estate developer Shining Group (鄉林集團), told a media briefing on Saturday.
The company is expected to report earnings per share of between NT$1.4 and NT$1.5 for last year, he added.
LUXURY VILLAS
The planned construction of The Lalu in downtown Qingdao, where 200 villas will be built on a 45,000 ping (14.9 hectare) plot of land at a cost of NT$3 billion (US$93.5 million), will be launched next month and completed by 2012, Lai said.
Upon completion, the hotel will be the most upscale hotel in China and charge a record-high room rate of US$500 per night, compared with the average rate of US$150 in China, the chairman said.
Property rights for half of the hotel’s 200 villas will be put up for sale to maximize returns from the project, he added.
VAST PLOTS
Lai said the planned construction of another The Lalu in Guilin would follow by the end of this year, while the branches in Nanjing and Suzhou will be built on much larger plots of land spanning more than 80,000 ping.
The Lalu in Nanjing will likely form part of a luxury complex featuring both retail properties such as storefronts and upscale residential units with a swimming pool overhanging each floor, he said.
The hotel’s China-bound expansion will be the result of a personal investment by Lai, since the government prohibits local real-estate developers tapping into the Chinese market.
“But once the restriction is lifted, I will turn all my personal investments in China into subsidiaries under Shining,” Lai said.
In the local market, Lai remains positive that there will be a property boom over the next three years. He expects prices to rise by between 5 percent and 10 percent by year’s end.
RESIDENTIAL PROJECTS
Shining Group plans to release residential projects worth NT$30 billion in the upcoming year, 90 percent of which will be located in Taipei City and Taipei County, he said.
Lai said 90 percent of the company’s upscale luxury residential homes near the Shilin Residence in Shilin (士林), Taipei, where prices average more than NT$3 million per ping, have been sold out.
Buyers include tycoons from Singapore, Hong Kong and China, as well as Taiwanese, he said.
Riding on the back of the nation’s economic recovery, domestic construction companies are likely to begin pre-sales of properties with a total worth of NT$800 billion this year, an increase of 70 percent from last year’s NT$472.7 billion, Lai said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”