The Fubon Group (富邦集團) will sell its department store business to upscale mall operator Breeze Center (微風廣場) as the retailing business is affected by the nation’s lackluster economic growth, the company said yesterday.
The planned termination of the three-year-old Momo Department Store (Momo 百貨) on Nanjing E Road in Taipei also reflects the increasingly fierce competition in this line of business in Taiwan, the Fubon Multimedia Technology Co (富邦媒體科技), a subsidiary of the group, said in a statement yesterday.
DAYS AWAY
“The company’s board has approved the end of its department store operations, which is expected to be taken over by the Breeze Center in coming days,” Fubon Multimedia said in the statement.
Besides Fubon group, other shareholders in the company include South Korean retail giant Lotte Shopping Co and Taiwan’s Teco Group (東元集團).
The company did not provide detailed financial terms nor the exact timeframe for the business to be handed over to Breeze. Domestic retailers are facing an increasingly difficult environment amid a weakening economy, which has caused consumers to be reluctant to spend.
RELUCTANT SPENDING
In the first half of the year, total department store sales grew only 0.9 percent to NT$130.9 billion (US$4.38 billion), the Ministry of Economic Affairs said last month. Fubon Multimedia, which also operates the Momo TV shopping channel and online shopping Web site, as well as Momo personal care and drugstore chain, said competition is becoming more severe among department store operators in Taiwan, where major players have expanded the scale of their business and are using the franchise model in order to stay competitive. “The smaller-scale Momo Department Store has also faced weakening profitability because of suppressed consumer spending in recent years,” the company’s chairman Howard Lin (林福星) said in the statement.
Following the closure of its physical department store outlets, the company will reallocate company resources into its virtual retail channels and aims to build a global platform in the future, Lin said.
The company’s retail business reported NT$18.7 billion in sales last year, up 19.87 percent from NT$15.6 billion in 2011. Sales for this year are expected to exceed NT$20 billion mark, according to the company.
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