After its open auction failed to attract bids yesterday, Star Travel Corp (燦星旅遊網) may engage in private negotiations with several buyers to liquidate its property on the 10th to 12th floors of the KGI commercial building on Taipei’s Bo-ai Road, auction organizer Savills Taiwan (第一太平戴維斯) said.
“We had nine potential buyers, four of which were highly interested in acquiring the property,” Savills Taiwan vice president Gordon Kao (高銘頂) said by telephone yesterday.
Kao attributed the auction’s failure to the ongoing dispute over rights to the property between Skylark Travel Service Co (天喜旅行社) and Star Travel.
He expressed confidence that Star Travel would be able to sell the property, but added that it might not command a premium price.
Star Travel yesterday said it would continue to seek ways to liquidate the property, which was previously owned by Skylark, but refused to say whether it would enter into direct talks with the four interested buyers, a company executive cited its chairman Chang Chuen (張鈞) as saying.
The executive, who declined to be identified, said Skylark Travel had relinquished its rights to the property to Star Travel in June last year before parent Tsann Kuen Group’s (燦坤) plan to merge its subsidiary Star Travel with cash-strapped Skylark Travel was abandoned.
“It remains our policy to liquidate the property, which we own,” he said.
In the middle of last month, Star Travel announced its plan to auction the 647.19 ping (2,135m²) property, asking for a floor price of NT$350 million (US$11.2 million).
But one day before the auction, Skylark Travel chairman David Kuo (郭正利) told a media briefing that the auction would be illegal since his company had dismissed Star Travel as its representative in organizing the property auction after their planned partnership was canceled.
In May last year, Tsann Kuen came to the rescue of Skylark Travel after it bounced checks totaling NT$6 million to NT$8 million.
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