Takashimaya Co, a leading Japanese retailer, has decided to sell its stake in a jointly owned department store in Taipei to its partner as a way of withdrawing from the Taiwan retail market, the department store said yesterday.
Takashimaya is to sell its 50 percent stake in the Dayeh Takashimaya Department Store (大葉高島屋百貨) in Taipei’s Shilin District (士林) to Dayeh Group (大葉集團), which owns the other half.
The stake is to be sold at a price of NT$492 million (US$15.04 million), according to local media reports.
In 1994, Takashimaya and Dayeh teamed up to open the department store in the affluent Tianmu (天母) neighborhood, where many expatriates live.
The store once generated annual revenue of NT$5.8 billion, but has been encountering stiff competition in the Tianmu area since the Pacific Sogo Department Store (太平洋崇光百貨) and the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store (新光三越百貨) entered the market, analysts said.
In 2014, Takashimaya Dayeh spent NT$1.2 billion on a remodeling project, hoping that a new image would attract young consumers, but it has not been able to meet its goal of NT$5 billion in annual revenue.
Meanwhile, Pacific Sogo and Shin Kong Mitsukoshi have been increasing their share of business in Tianmu, which is estimated to be NT$10 billion a year.
Takashimaya Dayeh said that over the past 20 years, it has built a management team that largely comprises local talent, adding that the share sale is unlikely to affect its operations.
Dayeh Group is a Taiwanese conglomerate that has a wide range of businesses, including retail, restaurants, healthcare, car engine development and property development.
The withdrawal of Takashimaya from the department store business in Taipei follows a similar move in March by Japan-based Hankyu Hanshin Department Stores, which was a joint owner of the Uni-President Hankyu department stores (統一阪急百貨) in Taipei and Kaohsiung for about 10 years.
RUN IT BACK: A succesful first project working with hyperscalers to design chips encouraged MediaTek to start a second project, aiming to hit stride in 2028 MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it is engaging a second hyperscaler to help design artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators used in data centers following a similar project expected to generate revenue streams soon. The first AI accelerator project is to bring in US$1 billion revenue next year and several billion US dollars more in 2027, MediaTek chief executive officer Rick Tsai (蔡力行) told a virtual investor conference yesterday. The second AI accelerator project is expected to contribute to revenue beginning in 2028, Tsai said. MediaTek yesterday raised its revenue forecast for the global AI accelerator used
TEMPORARY TRUCE: China has made concessions to ease rare earth trade controls, among others, while Washington holds fire on a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods China is effectively suspending implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminating investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, the White House announced. The White House on Saturday issued a fact sheet outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier in the week by US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Under the deal, China is to issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers
Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV’s China unit yesterday said that it had established sufficient inventories of finished goods and works-in-progress, and that its supply chain remained secure and stable after its parent halted wafer supplies. The Dutch company suspended supplies of wafers to its Chinese assembly plant a week ago, calling it “a direct consequence of the local management’s recent failure to comply with the agreed contractual payment terms,” Reuters reported on Friday last week. Its China unit called Nexperia’s suspension “unilateral” and “extremely irresponsible,” adding that the Dutch parent’s claim about contractual payment was “misleading and highly deceptive,” according to a statement
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
RSS