Leader Hotel Group (立德旅館事業) is scheduled to open a NT$3 billion (US$100 million) luxury hot spring resort in Yilan County in mid-2016, aiming to boost the value of the county’s tourism industry by NT$2 billion a year.
The resort is to be constructed through a “build-own-operate” (BOO) model with the Yilan County Government, and is one of three new projects planned in the next few years.
“The resort is to be the first step made by the group in tapping into the high-end hotel sector,” Leader Hotel chairman Lin Shu-po (林樹波) said in a statement before the resort’s launch today.
Leader Hotel operates three hotels and a restaurant in Taiwan and has previously based its operations on a “renovate operate transfer” (ROT) model.
The new resort, which will be in Dongshan Township (冬山), is planned to be a five-star hotel with 166 rooms, various restaurants and recreation facilities.
The group’s other three hotels in Taiwan — Leader Hotel Chi-Tou, Leader Village Taroko and Hotel Double One in Beitou District (北投) of Taipei — all target national tourists.
However, eyeing strong growth momentum in the number of foreign visitors to Taiwan, the hotel group now plans to focus on expansion projects with a different customer focus.
Leader Hotel also plans to launch a new 207-room hotel in New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止) by the end of this year.
This hotel, which is close to the Taipei World Trade Center Nangang Exhibition Hall (台北世界貿易中心南港展覽館), is to target urban business tourists, Leader Hotel said.
The hotel group also plans to open a 163-room hotel close to the Shihmen Reservoir (石門水庫) of Taoyuan County early next year.
The hotel group forecasts that the expansion plans should boost the group’s annual sales to NT$2 billion by 2016.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to