Taiwan’s two largest convenience store operators have launched a wider ranges of cakes and gifts ahead of Mother’s Day on May 11, seeking a bigger slice of the NT$1 billion (US$33.02 million) snack market associated with the day.
President Chain Store Corp (PCSC, 統一超商) and Taiwan FamilyMart Co (全家便利商店), launched their presale campaigns for Mother’s Day on March 5, which will be in place for two months, and focus exclusively on snacks and gift boxes for targeted consumers.
PCSC, which operates Taiwan’s largest convenience store chain, 7-Eleven, said it has more than 100 products in the presale drive, including cakes, snacks, health-food gift boxes and beauty care products.
Citing product diversification, PCSC decided to focus more on boosting sales of non-cake products in its presale event this year.
Last year, the convenience store operator added skincare products to the offering for Mother’s Day items for the first time, and those products received good feedback from female customers, encouraging the company to expand the range this year, it said.
This year, PCSC has cooperated with more brands, aiming to boost revenue in the beauty sector by 20 percent over the same period last year.
FamilyMart, the nation’s second-largest convenience store operator with about 2,900 stores nationwide, said it would continue to focus on offering different kinds of cakes this year, and broaden the selection.
The convenience store operator introduced various premium cakes, with prices ranging from NT$800 to NT$1,200, including a cake designed by Regis Douysset, who runs two Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe.
FamilyMart expected sales during the presale period from cakes to grow 10 percent to 20 percent compared with a year earlier.
For the first two months of the year, the two convenience store chain operators saw their consolidated sales rise slightly from a year ago.
PCSC posted NT$33.05 billion in consolidated revenue in the first two months, up 1.38 percent from a year ago, according to a company stock exchange filing.
Consolidated revenue for FamilyMart rose 4.36 percent to NT$8.58 billion in the first two months of the year, up from NT$8.22 billion recorded a year earlier, the company said in a statement.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by