Walt Disney Co’s new park in Shanghai will help the Uniqlo casual wear brand expand in China, Fast Retailing Co chairman Tadashi Yanai said on Saturday, shrugging off concerns over an economic slowdown in the Japanese retailer’s largest overseas market.
“The opening of the Shanghai Disneyland gives both of us, Uniqlo and Disney, a business opportunity,” Yanai, Japan’s richest person, told reporters in Shanghai, where Uniqlo opened a new Disney-inspired concept store on Sunday.
“Our business is getting absolutely no impact” from China’s slowdown, he said.
Uniqlo devoted an entire floor at its six-story China flagship store in central Shanghai to products codesigned with Disney. A human-sized Mickey Mouse statue greets visitors to the store, where T-shirts and toys depicting characters such as Tinker Bell, Woody of Disney Pixar’s Toy Story animated films, and Darth Vader from the Star Wars movies are on display.
Yanai reiterated his plans to open 100 stores a year in China, potentially reaching as many as 3,000 outlets as Uniqlo competes with Hennes & Mauritz AB’s H&M and Inditex SA’s Zara to win over consumers in the world’s most populous country.
The Japanese retailer’s design tie-up comes as Disney prepares to open its US$5.5 billion Shanghai theme park next year, its biggest foreign investment and a bet on the country’s booming middle-class.
Uniqlo has about 360 stores in China, the most by country outside Japan, where it has almost 850 shops.
China is a key market for Fast Retailing as Yanai targets to build Asia’s biggest clothing retailer into the world leader, with a target of ¥5 trillion in sales by 2020 from its forecast of ¥1.65 trillion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31.
The Disney collaboration should help Uniqlo boost sales in China “as buzz builds around the opening of Shanghai Disneyland,” Bloomberg Intelligence retail analyst Thomas Jastrzab said. “Expanding store-specific limited edition merchandise offerings should help Uniqlo increase regular foot traffic and improve customer loyalty.”
Yanai said demand for Uniqlo products will increase amid an economic slowdown in China. Everyday clothes with basic designs and advanced materials that Uniqlo sells at affordable prices fit well as China shifts its focus to consumer purchasing from manufacturing, he said.
“An economic slowdown in China could boost Uniqlo’s sales, particularly as shoppers increasingly look for value-for-money when purchasing clothing essentials such as T-shirts and pants,” Jastrzab said.
“Our concept of manufacturing is fundamentally different and unique,” Yanai said. “We don’t chase trends, but we would rather want to incorporate fashgrbudget earmarked for 500 expected applicants went unused, said a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which administered the program.
The spokeswoman blamed the strict conditions for qualifying for the scheme, admitting it was “not a good program.”
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