Ambassador Hotel Ltd (國賓大飯店) yesterday said its budget Amba-brand hotel in downtown Taipei, would start making a profit this year, one year after its establishment, making it another earnings driver for the company.
The news was a welcome boost for Ambassador Hotel, which in recent months has seen declining numbers of Japanese tourists — its main target customers — because the yen’s sharp depreciation has led to Japanese tourists being less inclined to travel abroad.
The hotel had an average room occupancy rate of about 80 percent in the first five months of the year, compared with 84 percent last year.
By contrast, Amba Taipei Ximen-ding (台北西門町意舍) has seen an average room occupancy rate of 90 percent over the past few months, Ambassador vice president Bill Chen (陳榮輝) said.
The company plans to launch its second Amba hotel near Songshan Railway Station in Taipei in 2015, with a third planned for Pingtung County in 2016.
After an investors’ conference yesterday, Chen told reporters that the company would rely on controlling expenses and the sales contribution from the Amba Taipei to maintain its profitability at at least the same as last year’s NT$282.87 million (US$9.38 million), or NT$0.77 per share.
The company also aims to attract more individual travelers from China, as well as domestic tourists, to increase the scope of its sales. It is also scheduled to launch its first restaurant in Hualien in August.
From January to last month, consolidated revenue stood at NT$1.3 billion, up 4.05 percent from a year ago, the company said in a stock exchange filing.
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts