Starbucks Corp, the world’s biggest coffee-shop chain, will start selling its Via instant coffee in the “greater China” region, which it forecast will be its biggest growth market in two years.
The instant coffee, which will include Italian Roast and Colombian flavors, will be sold starting on April 6 at Starbucks’ 800 stores in China, including Hong Kong and Macau, as well as Taiwan, said Caren Li (勵靜), the chain’s spokeswoman in China. The products, priced at 25 yuan (US$3.80) for a pack of three and 88 yuan for a dozen in mainland China, will only be available in Starbucks stores, she said.
The chain plans to increase the number of its outlets in China to 1,500 by 2015 from about 400 now. China will be the company’s biggest growth market in two years, chief executive officer Howard Schultz said in November.
Sales at China’s coffee shops more than tripled to 35 million yuan in 2009 from 11 million yuan in 2004, according to data from Euromonitor International.
Starbucks dominated the market with a 70 percent share last year, Euromonitor said.
The Seattle-based coffee chain increased its prices for some Frappuccino products in China by as much as 2 yuan this year as raw material costs rose.
It opened its first store in China in Beijing in 1999.
Starbucks said in November that it would set up a farm and processing facilities in Yunnan Province.
The company had 17,009 stores in more than 50 countries as of Jan. 2, its Web site 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],”
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