WeWork Cos, the coworking space company that is among the world’s most valuable start-ups, is in advanced talks to rent a building in Hong Kong’s popular nightlife district near the territory’s business center, according to people familiar with the matter.
The New York-based firm is seeking to rent Hotel LKF by Rhombus on Wyndham Street, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information has not been publicly disclosed.
The boutique hotel, located in the Lan Kwai Fong district that is known for its bars and nightclubs, closed down on July 1 and is to be converted into an office building by the middle of next year, the owner, Peterson Group, said last month.
WeWork’s expansion in the world’s priciest property market comes as soaring office rents have pushed some financial firms and hedge funds out of the financial district.
Demand for flexible and shared offices is surging in Asia, with the area taken up by such work spaces in Hong Kong’s central business district expected to double this year to 23,225.76m2, according to property broker Colliers International.
Flexible work spaces accounted for about 9 percent of the office space in the territory’s financial district as of last year, Colliers said.
Spokeswomen at Peterson Group and WeWork declined to comment.
The agreement is not final and negotiations might still fall through, one of the people said.
WeWork rents out flexible office space to start-ups, freelancers and businesses, and runs more than 20 office projects across Asia.
As part of its expansion across Asia, WeWork announced a joint venture with Softbank Group last week in Japan and plans to open its first office in Tokyo next year.
WeWork earlier this month raised US$760 million in a funding round that values it at about US$20 billion after the investment, said a person familiar with the matter, ranking it among the world’s five most valuable start-ups.
The company last year rented more than 9,290.304m2 in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai and Causeway Bay areas, according to data from Jones Lang LaSalle Ltd.
Hotel LKF, which includes 14 floors of rooms and nine floors of retail space, is housed above Gordon Ramsay’s Bread Street Kitchen & Bar restaurant, which is expected to stay.
The average annual prime office rent in Hong Kong is US$112 per square foot (0.093m2), higher than the US$86 per square foot in London’s city center and US$82 per square foot in midtown New York, according to data from Colliers.
Coworking spaces let people stay in traditional office areas while reducing rental costs, Hong Kong-based Jones Lang Lasalle research head Denis Ma (馬安平) said in a telephone interview.
“Twelve months ago, when we talked to developers and asked them what kind of tenants they were targeting to fill up their new buildings, most would’ve mentioned large international banks. Fast forward to today, most will say they’re talking with coworking operators,” Ma said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the