Gsharp Corp (宜津企業), operator of the Parkview Hotel (美侖大飯店) in Hualien, has won the bid for a 70-year freehold lease to develop a hotel building in Taipei’s Zhongshan District (中山), as the hotelier seeks to deepen its presence in Taipei, auction organizer Savills Taiwan Ltd (第一太平戴維斯) said on Tuesday.
Gsharp, which has operated the Park Taipei Hotel in Daan District since 2008, won the superficies deal for NT$716.88 million (US$23.73 million) from the Taipei City Government, about 1.5 times the floor price, Savills said.
Gsharp plans to turn the plot of 338.19 ping (1,118m2) near the MRT’s Nanjing Songjiang Station into a hotel building with 80 guest rooms priced at NT$4,000 per night, Savills said.
“The auction drew three bidders and all are in the hotel industry, attracted by the growing number of tourists from China,” Savills said.
The lack of permanent ownership sidelined builders and developers, the broker said, adding that the plot is jointly owned by the Taipei City Government and the Ministry of National Defense.
The latest Gsharp investment could create 175 job opportunities and help the government better utilize idle assets, Savills said.
In related news, the city government is to lower asking prices for the superficies rights of a plot measuring 5,452 ping in Xinyi District (信義) after three previous auctions fell through.
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