The Tai Tong Food & Beverage Group (TTFB, 瓦城泰統集團), which operates three restaurant chains with nearly 60 outlets in Taiwan, yesterday announced its first restaurant in Shanghai will open next month, saying it plans to expand the number of Chinese outlets to 10 by the end of next year.
SIXTIETH RESTAURANT
The Shanghai restaurant is a Thai Town Cuisine outlet (瓦城泰式料理), located in the Reel Department Store (芮歐百貨) and will target customers between 25 and 40 years old with an average transaction per customer of between 100 yuan (US$16.4) and 150 yuan (US$24.6).
“This will be the group’s 60th restaurant globally,” group chairman Charles Hsu (徐承義) told a media briefing.
Hsu did not specify a sales target for the new restaurant. Citing experience in Taiwan, he said a Thai Town restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) could generate sales of NT$50 million (US$1.7 million) to NT$60 million (US$2.03 million) annually.
The group operates restaurants under three brands: Thai Town, Very Thai Restaurant (非常泰) and 1010 Hunan Cuisine (1010 湘辣料理).
It plans to launch future outlets in China in Shanghai, Nanjing and Suzhou, with a special focus on East China.
“Most of these restaurants will be located in department stores or shopping malls, in line with the group’s successful operation in Taiwan,” Hsu said.
The group has been preparing its expansion plan in China for the past year, having already invested NT$10 million in Shanghai thus far, he added.
The group will unveil its fourth brand in Taiwan in the first quarter next year, with a goal to expand a total of 30 restaurants under its four brands annually.
BIG 100
The expansion across the Taiwan Strait will help increase the number of the group’s restaurants worldwide to 100 by the end of next year.
The group’s consolidated sales for the first nine months totaled NT$1.72 billion, up 17.78 percent from a year ago, company data showed.
Shares of TTFB dropped 0.73 percent to close at NT$273 on the GRETAI Securities Market yesterday.
In Italy’s storied gold-making hubs, jewelers are reworking their designs to trim gold content as they race to blunt the effect of record prices and appeal to shoppers watching their budgets. Gold prices hit a record high on Thursday, surging near US$5,600 an ounce, more than double a year ago as geopolitical concerns and jitters over trade pushed investors toward the safe-haven asset. The rally is putting undue pressure on small artisans as they face mounting demands from customers, including international brands, to produce cheaper items, from signature pieces to wedding rings, according to interviews with four independent jewelers in Italy’s main
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has talked up the benefits of a weaker yen in a campaign speech, adopting a tone at odds with her finance ministry, which has refused to rule out any options to counter excessive foreign exchange volatility. Takaichi later softened her stance, saying she did not have a preference for the yen’s direction. “People say the weak yen is bad right now, but for export industries, it’s a major opportunity,” Takaichi said on Saturday at a rally for Liberal Democratic Party candidate Daishiro Yamagiwa in Kanagawa Prefecture ahead of a snap election on Sunday. “Whether it’s selling food or
In the wake of strong global demand for AI applications, Taiwan’s export-oriented economy accelerated with the composite index of economic indicators flashing the first “red” light in December for one year, indicating the economy is in booming mode, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Moreover, the index of leading indicators, which gauges the potential state of the economy over the next six months, also moved higher in December amid growing optimism over the outlook, the NDC said. In December, the index of economic indicators rose one point from a month earlier to 38, at the lower end of the “red” light.
RSS