Gap Inc said Glenn Murphy is scheduled to step down as its chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) on Feb. 1 next year, and the retailer is set to promote executive Art Peck to CEO.
The San Francisco company said on Wednesday that Murphy is departing at the end of its current fiscal year. He has been Gap’s chairman and CEO since July 2007.
Peck is in charge of the company’s digital strategy and leads the company’s Athleta, Intermix and Piperlime brands. He has worked for Gap since 2005.
Bob Fisher, whose parents founded the retail chain, is in line to become non-executive chairman. Peck will also join the board of directors.
The company started a turnaround in early 2012 by stepping up its marketing and offering trendier merchandise.
It is also expanding outside the US, and said earlier this year it wants to triple its sales in China in three years as it opens more stores there.
Gap is also trying to meld its online business with its physical stores as it sees shoppers’ purchases influenced by the Web and mobile devices.
A year ago, the company started testing a program that lets customers reserve merchandise online and then pick it up at the store within 24 hours.
The company also reported disappointing sales for last month on Wednesday.
Gap’s total revenue rose 1 percent to US$1.48 billion.
Sales at stores open at least a year were unchanged, as the company reported lower revenue for the Gap brand and better results at its Banana Republic and Old Navy divisions.
Sales at stores open at least a year are considered an important measurement of retailer health because they leave out results from stores that have opened or closed within the last year.
Gap shares dropped 8.7 percent, or US$3.65, to US$38.25 in aftermarket trading.
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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts