Starting on April 1, EasyCard (悠遊卡) holders will be able to use the cards to pay for purchases at more than 10,000 retail stores, the company said yesterday.
“The smartcard payment system in Taiwan has lagged behind Hong Kong and Singapore for many years,” EasyCard Corp (悠遊卡股份有限公司) chairman Sean Lien (連勝文) told a press conference yesterday. “But now we are catching up.”
Launched in 1997, Hong Kong’s Octopus is one of the world’s leading smartcard payment systems. It has more than 2,500 partnering service providers, including operators of public transport, parking, retail, vending and kiosks, schools and leisure facilities, and can be used as access control for residential and commercial buildings.
PHOTO: CNA
More than 20 million Octopus cards and products are in circulation, and the system handles more than 11 million transactions a day, with the total amount exceeding HK$100 million (US$13 million), its Web site says.
Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission gave the green light in January to EasyCard Corp’s application to use the card as an electronic cash card.
Users will be able to store as much as NT$10,000 (US$300) on their EasyCard to pay for transactions below NT$1,000. The daily spending limit will be capped at NT$3,000.
There are currently 17.7 million cards in circulation, with more than 4 million used every day. Major retailers have joined the campaign to promote smartcard payment. Convenience store chains such as 7-Eleven, cosmetics and drugstore chains Watsons and Cosmed (康是美), food and beverage brands Pizza Hut, Mister Donut and Starbucks, as well as Miramar Cinemas (美麗華影城) will be among the first wave of vendors accepting payment via EasyCard.
President Chain Store Corp (統一超商), the operator of 7-Eleven, yesterday said it would offer a two-in-one smartcard that combines its icash card and EasyCard’s functions.
The company allows consumers to use the chip-embedded icash card to store cash to pay for transactions at its 4,800 stores and collect bonus points.
It is the most widely circulated membership card among all convenience store chains, with 8.4 million in circulation.
The new icash/EasyCard should boost icash circulation to 13 million by the end of the year, it said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last