As part of its efforts to attract Southeast Asian and Muslim customers, Taipei Garden Hotel (台北花園大酒店) is to host a month-long Malaysian food festival, starting next week.
The hotel hopes the festival, which is to open on Monday and run through May 11, will boost revenue at La Fusion (六國餐廳) buffet restaurant by 10 percent to 20 percent, as well as promote appreciation of Malaysian food, chief food and beverage operating officer Steven Shih (石益鳴) said.
“We agree with the government that the industry should diversify its source of customers and reach out to Southeast Asian and Muslim guests to remain competitive and profitable,” Shih said on the sidelines of a news conference.
La Fusion’s revenue last year totaled NT$80 million (US$2.63 million), Shih said.
The number of travelers from Southeast Asia to Taiwan grew 16.2 percent from 1.42 million to 1.65 million last year, with the number of Malaysian visitors increasing by 20 percent, assistant director of marketing and communication Blythe Chao (趙芝綺) said, adding that those numbers warranted a shift of attention to travelers from Southeast Asia.
Malaysian chef Shahrom B. Sarri last month joined Taipei Garden to lead the food festival, which will highlight 40 popular dishes from different parts of Malaysia.
The Malaysian festival buffet has been priced at NT$699 per person on weekdays and NT$899 per person on weekends.
The hotel has two other restaurants, a lounge bar and several function rooms with food and beverage generating 54.95 percent of its overall revenue in February, Tourism Bureau data showed.
Occupancy rates reached 89.83 percent in February with daily room rates standing at NT$2,064, bureau data showed.
Taipei Garden, part of the Cosmos Hotel & Resorts Group (天成飯店集團), aims to achieve a 90 percent occupancy rate this year, Chao said.
The group, which operates Cosmos Hotel Taipei (台北天成大飯店), Sun Dialogue Hotel (天成文旅-繪日之丘), Bee House (蜂巢) and ICASA (回行旅), is aiming for a 3 percent increase in revenue this year after last year’s flat performance, Chao said.
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