Taiwan has been ranked the sixth-biggest retail export hub in the Greater China region, for the amount of products it sells on EBay to overseas buyers, according to a survey released on Thursday by US e-commerce giant EBay Inc.
The report, titled 2013 Greater China Retail Export Industry Landscape, surveyed more than 800 e-commerce sellers in the region for transaction data from July last year to June this year and found that the five places that registered the most sales overseas were Guangdong, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Beijing.
Taiwan’s sixth place in terms of transaction value is a result of its long history in conducting trade, its mature system for sellers, and its sufficient supply of workers with a specialty in trade, said John Lin (林奕彰), EBay’s vice president and CEO of the company’s Greater China branch.
“We believe that the retail export industry is entering a new phase marked by more holistic growth and greater professionalism, as local sellers are leveraging local resources and developing specialty product categories,” he told a press briefing.
The top-five product categories with the highest transaction value for Taiwanese sellers were costume and accessories, photographic equipment, automobile accessories, sports goods, and computers and accessories, according to EBay’s survey.
Mature markets like the US, Australia and the UK still accounted for the bulk of Taiwanese sellers’ transaction value, while sales in emerging markets such as Argentina, Brazil and Russia posted the fastest growth, the survey showed.
According to market research company eMarketer, the Asia-Pacific region will contribute the majority of business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce sales in coming years.
B2C e-commerce sales are expected to grow 23 percent in the Asia-Pacific region this year, with sales in China and Indonesia growing particularly fast at 65 percent and 71 percent, respectively, above the worldwide average of 17 percent, eMarketer 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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained