Nearly one of every two Taiwanese consumers has purchased products via mobile Web sites or apps, according to a survey released yesterday by Yahoo Inc’s Taiwan branch.
The results of this year’s Yahoo Taiwan e-commerce survey show that 44.6 percent of the respondents have shopped via mobile browsers or smartphone apps, an increase from 34.2 percent recorded in a similar survey last year.
In terms of frequency, 24.8 percent of the respondents said they shop using smartphones about once a month, with another 45.5 percent saying they do mobile shopping more than once a month.
About 48.2 percent of the respondents aged 30 to 39 said they have shopped on smartphones, the highest among all age groups, while 35.3 percent of those over 50 said they do not limit how much they spend on mobile shopping, the survey said.
The survey was based on 4,470 valid samples collected between June 23 and July 18 via an online questionnaire. It had a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of plus or minus 1.47 percent.
Jacky Wang (王志仁), head of Yahoo Taiwan’s e-commerce group, told a press conference that with more personalized designs of mobile apps and mobile shopping sites, consumers now have easier access to what they want to buy via their smartphones.
Wang said that about 38 percent of Yahoo Taiwan’s e-commerce revenue has come from mobile users so far this year, up from about 20 percent in the same period last year.
In the meantime, the number of mobile visitors to Yahoo Taiwan’s e-commerce site has jumped by 160 percent since the portal’s e-commerce smartphone app was launched in March, while its number of e-commerce transactions has increased by 62 percent, Wang said.
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],”
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
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