Lion Travel Service Co Ltd (雄獅旅行社), one of the nation’s leading travel agencies, is set to list on Taiwan’s Emerging Stock Market (興櫃市場) on Tuesday ahead of its listing on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) in the first half of next year at the earliest.
Local securities regulations require a company to be listed as an emerging stock for no less than six months before it goes public on the main board or the over-the-counter (OTC) market.
Lion Travel would become be the nation’s second listed travel agency once it starts trading on the main bourse, following Phoenix Tours International Inc (鳳凰國際旅行社).
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
Continuous sluggish economic sentiment has not affected Lion Travel’s sales performance this year, president Albert Pei (裴信祐) said on the sidelines of a press conference to promote the nation’s largest international travel show.
The annual Taipei International Travel Fair is scheduled to begin on Friday next week, with a total of 850 tourism-related companies occupying more than 1,000 booths in the four-day fair, organizers said.
“The rise in the sentiment for vacation tours helped hold the company’s sales this year,” Pei said.
Since Taiwan was granted entry to the US Visa-Waiver Program, Pei expected tourist numbers to the US to show significant growth next year, boosting the company’s sales and profitability. The company will launch a new tour to the western US at the travel fair, Pei added.
Lion Travel posted NT$55.69 million (US$1.9 million), or NT$1.01 per share, in net profit in the first half of this year, up from NT$40.56 million, or NT$0.96 per share, recorded during the same period last year, company financial data showed.
Revenue totaled NT$5.92 billion in the first six months of the year, up 19.53 percent from a year earlier, statistics showed.
Phoenix Tours president Anthony Liao (廖文澄) shared Pei’s views by expecting the US Visa-Waiver Program to increase the number of Taiwanese holidaying in the US by 30 percent next year.
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