Breeze Development Co Ltd (微風廣場實業), which operates three department stores and two shopping malls in Taipei, is to launch its first department store in the city’s Xinyi District (信義) on Friday, hoping to generate NT$3 billion (US$98.64 million) in sales next year.
The upcoming Breeze Song Gao (微風松高) department store is aimed at customers between 15 and 30 years old, and the company has said that more than 80 percent of the new venture’s tenant stores are to be “exclusive,” either with no other outlets in Xinyi or across the nation.
“Instead of cannibalizing the current market in the district, we hope the launch of this new department store will bring in new customers with new demand, leading to a bigger market for the area’s department store sector as a whole,” Breeze Development chief executive Henry Liao (廖鎮漢) told a media briefing yesterday.
The company’s new store is to introduce more than 20 South Korean brands in the apparel, skincare, and food and beverage sectors, hoping to capitalize on young customers’ interest in South Korean pop culture and fashion, Liao said.
Breeze Song Gao is also to include the nation’s first Hennes & Mauritz AB (H&M) store, Europe’s second-largest clothing retailer, with the three-floor outlet expected to be launched officially in January next year.
The company has invested between NT$1.5 billion and NT$2 billion in the new department store over the past 11 months, Liao said, adding that it expects the venture to break even in its second year of operation.
Breeze Development is also planning to open a second department store in Xinyi in October next year, forecasting that the two stores will raise the company’s total sales to between NT$23 billion and NT$25 billion in 2016, compared with its sales target of NT$13 billion this year.
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