AmorePacific Group, the biggest skincare and cosmetics company in terms of sales in South Korea, is accelerating its expansion in Taiwan this year, focusing on boosting its organic skincare and cosmetics brand, Innisfree, in Taipei.
The group on Friday launched its second outlet in Taiwan under the Innisfree brand, in Taipei’s east district shopping zone, with the group investing about NT$10 million (US$332,780).
The new store is the brand’s flagship outlet in Taiwan, opened about two months after the group opened its first Innisfree outlet in the nation.
“The sales performance of the first outlet has been stronger than expected, leading the group to speed up its expansion in Taiwan,” the brand said in a statement on Thursday.
Innisfree saw daily sales at its first outlet average between NT$180,000 and NT$250,000 over the past two months, 50 percent higher than the parent company had expectated, the statement said.
SECOND BEST
The average was the second-highest average sales per unit area among the brand’s nearly 1,000 outlets globally, it said.
Average customer spending was between NT$800 and NT$1,000, which translates to three or four products purchased by each customer, the statement said.
The group expects the brand’s total sales in Taiwan to double or triple from current levels following the launch of the flagship store.
In addition, AmorePacific is set to open the brand’s third Innisfree outlet in the nation by the end of this year in Taipei, with an aim to make Innisfree the biggest South Korean skincare and cosmetics brand in Taiwan in terms of market share.
Innisfree made NT$9.5 billion in revenue last year, accounting for about 7 percent of the overall sales AmorePacific made, company data showed.
AmorePacific aims to grow Innisfree revenue by 47 percent this year to NT$14 billion, as it plans to launch a total of 60 new outlets outside South Korea, including in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Currently, overseas sales account for about 20 percent of overall revenue, according to company statistics.
1989 ENTRY
AmorePacific made its entry in Taiwan in 1989 selling products through a joint venture under two brands — Laneige and Iope. Iope is a cosmeceutical brand that targets customers in their mid-20s to mid-30s.
As a result of Laneige’s great success, the group established a separate, wholly owned subsidiary in Taiwan in 2004 and introduced various brands in the market in succession, including a herbal medicinal brand, Sulwhasoo.
Laneige currently operates 22 counters in major department stores in the nation, including Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store Co (新光三越百貨), Pacific Sogo Department Stores Co (太平洋崇光百貨) and Far Eastern Department Stores (遠東百貨).
The Sulwhasoon brand has three counters nationwide.
This story has been updated on June 3 since it was first published.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
CHINA RIVAL: The chips are positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell products and would enable clusters connecting more than 100,000 chips Moore Threads Technology Co (摩爾線程) introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) in years. “These products will significantly enhance world-class computing speed and capabilities that all developers aspire to,” Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong (張建中), a former Nvidia executive, said on Saturday at a company event in Beijing. “We hope they can meet the needs of more developers in China so that you no longer need to wait for advanced foreign products.” Chinese chipmakers are in