Watson’s Personal Care Stores (Taiwan) Co Ltd (台灣屈臣氏), the nation’s largest cosmetics and drugstore operator, aims to expand its local outlets to 600 over the next two years in a bid to boost total sales.
Watson’s yesterday launched its 500th outlet in Taiwan — a new generation store in Taipei’s Ximending (西門町) area to give customers a larger space to experience interactive shopping services.
“We have improved our store segmentation strategy to meet demand from customers in different areas,” managing director Toby Anderson told a media briefing yesterday.
Watson’s launched a store refurbishment initiative last year to renovate 100 stores, Anderson said.
As a result, the company decided to renovate a further 100 stores this year, he said.
Anderson said that Watson’s, which operates cosmetics stores in 12 markets in Asia and Europe, sees Taiwan as a benchmark for other markets to launch pilot store models.
“Taiwan has a mature retail market with sophisticated consumer behavior, which makes it a great place for innovation,” Anderson said.
Watson’s also launched another store model — the “Generation Y store” — in Taiwan, catering to the needs of younger consumers. Generation Y stores offer more fashionable skincare and cosmetics products.
Anderson said the company plans to launch two Generation Y stores in Shanghai later this year, due to the success in Taiwan.
The company said revenue from Taiwan last year rose to the highest level in four years and it expects to maintain the growth momentum this year.
Strong sales momentum primarily came from its own-brand products, which total more than 600 items, as sales from those products doubled or even tripled the overall growth rate, Anderson said.
Watson’s plans to concentrate more on boosting revenue from its online stores, as the company has more than 6 million online-store members and 650,000 downloads of its mobile app.
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
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
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since
purpose: Tesla’s CEO sought to meet senior Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of its ‘full self-driving’ software in China and approval to transfer data they had collected Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk arrived in Beijing yesterday on an unannounced visit, where he is expected to meet senior officials to discuss the rollout of "full self-driving" (FSD) software and permission to transfer data overseas, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Chinese state media reported that he met Premier Li Qiang (李強) in Beijing, during which Li told Musk that Tesla's development in China could be regarded as a successful example of US-China economic and trade cooperation. Musk confirmed his meeting with the premier yesterday with a post on social media platform X. "Honored to meet with Premier Li