MedFirst Healthcare Services Inc (杏一), which operates healthcare stores with medical consultancy services, yesterday said that it is considering building a second logistics center in Taiwan next year to accommodate its growing number of shops.
The proposed logistics center would likely be similar in size to the existing one in Yangmei City (楊梅), Taoyuan County, which was opened in February last year and can serve 230 to 240 stores, MedFirst president Jimmy Tsai (蔡德忠) told reporters yesterday.
A leading operator of healthcare supply stores in the nation, the company has 179 outlets and nine shopping centers, Tsai said, adding that it plans to open at least 98 more shops.
Photo: CNA
“We have to start building a new logistics center before the one we have reaches its maximum capacity,” he said.
MedFirst also provides logistics services for other companies, he added.
It invested about NT$380 million (US$12.42 million) in the Yangmei logistics center, which took between one and 1.5 years to build.
Now, the company is looking for a plot of land of about 3,300 ping (10,909m2) in Taoyuan on which to build the second center, which it expects will lower costs and increase efficiency in the long term, Tsai said.
The logistics center in Yangmei enables stores to receive items they need to restock within 24 hours, down from the 72 hours it took to do so in the past, MedFirst assistant vice president Jesse Wei (魏子文) said, adding that the company aims to further reduce that time to less than a day next year.
“Before the center was built, sales on Mondays and Tuesdays were always low, because logistics companies in Taiwan do not distribute goods during weekends,” Wei said.
The company’s online warehouse management system informs the logistics center when a store’s inventory levels fall below a set threshold and also collects sales information for every outlet, with the data used to forecast future sales and distribute necessary items to shops in a timely manner, Wei said.
“The system helps inexperienced store owners order accurate amounts of inventory for their store,” he said.
In addition, the system provides shop owners with immediate information about what the company has in the warehouse in Yangmei, he added.
There are 40 to 42 employees in the center, which distributed NT$120 million worth of goods to all of MedFirst’s stores each month since December last year.
The loading process used at the center has increased the accuracy of loading to 99.8 percent, up from about 98 percent previously, Wei said.
However, the rate was still lower than the 99.9 percent achieved by global logistics companies, he added.
In the past three quarters, MedFirst posted revenue of NT$2.64 billion, up 6 percent from NT$2.49 billion the previous year, according to the company’s filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
MedFirst’s seven stores and two shopping centers in China generated revenue of 13.14 million yuan (US$2.15 million) over the past three quarters, up 17 percent from the previous year, it said.
“Sales at retail shops in China are dropping amid the rise of online shopping,” Tsai said, adding that the company suffered less from the trend because it also offers consultancy services.
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