The Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, a Hong Kong-based luxury hotel operator, yesterday launched its first hotel in Taiwan, with the goal of having the highest average room rates in the country within the first year of operation by targeting Asian tourists.
The new hotel took eight years to construct and is located on the former site of the Mandarina Crown Hotel (中泰賓館) on Dunhua N Road adjacent to the Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport).
The Mandarin Oriental Taipei is the newest outlet opened by the hotel chain and offers 256 guest rooms and 47 suites, with an advertised price for a standard room at NT$16,500 (US$550) per night, possibly making it Taiwan’s most expensive and upscale hotel.
“We expect the average rate of room occupancy to reach 70 percent to 80 percent in the first year of operation,” Lin Ming-chun (林命群), owner of the land housing the hotel and chairman of the original Mandarina Crown, told reporters after the new hotel’s opening ceremony.
Lin said he expects Chinese tourists to be the major customers, predicting they will account for more than 50 percent of its total clients.
The Japanese are forecast to come next, making up of 20 percent of overall customers, but clients from Southeast Asia are predicted to hold the strongest growth potential in the long run, Lin said.
However, Lin declined to comment on the alleged recent disputes about Mandarin Oriental Taipei’s ownership reported by the Chinese-language weekly Business Today (今周刊) last week.
The weekly reported that billionaire Wang Kong-wei (王公威) has replaced Lin as the hotel’s largest shareholder, after he purchased a more than a 50 percent stake in Kai Tai Fung International Co Ltd (開泰豐國際), which owns the building and facilities.
Based on information provided by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Wang is now the new chairman of Kai Tai.
However, Lin said that he still owns the land on which the Mandarin Oriental Taipei was built, a report by the Chinese-language Commercial Times said.
That indicates that he still holds a controlling stake in the hotel.
Based on the ministry’s information, Lin holds a 49 percent share in Kai Tai.
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said at yesterday’s launch that he hopes Mandarin Oriental Taipei will attract more international travelers to the city.
UBS Securities said the opening will not affect high-end accommodation demand and supply in the hotel sector much, as the 303-room hotel represented only a 7 percent increase in supply of Taipei’s five-star hotels.
That is lower than the annual expansion in tourist arrivals of 10 percent recorded this year, according to UBS.
In addition, the Mandarin Oriental Taipei’s room rate will be significantly higher than most luxury hotels’ in the city, so the risk of price competition is low, the brokerage house said in its most recent research report.
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],”
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
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