South Korea’s Lotte Group will continue to invest in its China business despite diplomatic tensions over the deployment of a US missile defense system, a Lotte executive said yesterday, denying rumors it wants to scale back there.
Chinese authorities closed dozens of Lotte retail stores following inspections, ramping up pressure on South Korea’s fifth-largest family-run conglomerate after it agreed to provide land for the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system outside Seoul.
South Korea and its ally, the US, say the system is designed to thwart nuclear-armed North Korea’s missile threat, but Beijing said its radar can also reach far into China.
Chinese state media have called for a boycott of Lotte businesses in response to the THAAD deployment.
“It’s been 20 years since Lotte entered the China market ... we believe the China business is still in an investment period,” high-ranking executive Hwang Kag-gyu told reporters.
South Korean media including Yonhap have raised the possibility of Lotte scaling back its China business in the wake of the backlash against the company there.
Lotte has not outlined a strategy to cope with the difficulties besides “waiting” for it to blow over.
Chinese signs reading “[We] understand you. So [we] wait,” were put up in Lotte’s flagship department store in Seoul last month.
“As a market, China isn’t yet fully developed, especially in the middle and western regions. In order to grow globally, China is needed,” a Lotte official who declined to be identified said. “The THAAD issue is not something one company can solve.”
Out of 99 Lotte hypermarkets in China, 75 had been closed by Chinese authorities as of Sunday, a Lotte Mart spokesman said.
Lotte Mart reported 1.13 trillion won (US$1.01 billion) in China sales last year.
China is Lotte’s biggest overseas market and generated about 3 trillion won in revenue last year. It is one of four strategic markets along with Vietnam, Russia and Indonesia that Lotte has been focusing on, as retail growth in its home market slows.
Hwang said the planned initial public offering of Hotel Lotte would depend on its key duty-free business recovering from the “THAAD effect.”
What had been a US$4.5 billion initial public offering was shelved last year.
“All we can do is watch,” he said.
South Korean airlines and tourism operators have also experienced discriminatory tactics from China, hitting the country’s duty-free market.
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