Mattel Inc, the world’s biggest toymaker, closed its only Barbie store in China yesterday, more than a year after lowering the outlet’s sales target by at least 30 percent.
Mattel didn’t cite a reason for shutting Barbie Shanghai, which opened in March 2009. The company will have a new “brand strategy” for Barbie and expand operations across China this year, it said in an e-mailed statement.
The toymaker, based in El Segundo, California, joins Best Buy Co in closing down stores in China, even after retail sales in the world’s fastest-growing major economy surged last year.
Mattel lowered the sales targets of the 3,500m2 store in central Shanghai at least three times since opening it.
“Mattel continues to be committed to developing the Barbie brand in China,” the company said in the statement. “In 2011, the company will take all of the great experiences previously only available at the Barbie concept store in Shanghai to many more consumers in broader areas across China.”
About US$3 billion worth of Barbie-branded products are sold every year. Barbie dolls are made in China and Indonesia, according to Mattel.
The company modeled the store’s concept on American Girl, Mattel’s online doll catalog that also has retail stores and restaurants in the US. Mattel intended the Shanghai store to generate revenue from its retail sales, spa, restaurant and what it calls the “retail experience,” which includes having children pretend to model clothes on a fashion runway and to design customized Barbie dolls.
Best Buy, the world’s largest consumer-electronics retailer, will close all nine of its own-branded stores in China to focus on expanding the more profitable, domestic Five Star chain it acquired five years ago, the company said on Feb. 22.
Retail sales in the world’s most populous nation grew a monthly average of 18 percent last year, according to official data.
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