Regent Taipei (台北晶華酒店), the flagship property of Regent Hotels & Resorts (晶華麗晶酒店集團), over the weekend wooed local diners with a luxury wagyu meal that it provided in collaboration with Japan’s Kakiyasu Group.
Regent Taipei managing director Simon Wu (吳偉正) said that he is expecting an extra NT$5 million (US$170,068) in sales at its Japanese restaurant Mihan Honke (三燔本家) this month alone on the back of the collaboration.
Food and beverages accounted for about 60 percent of the five-star facility’s revenue of NT$683.52 million last year and it is expected to add 5 percent this year amid continuing economic growth at home and abroad, Wu said.
The figure represents a 1.94 percent increase from the volume in 2016, according to the company’s filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Taiwan’s beef market is worth NT$18 billion a year, Ministry of Economic Affairs data showed.
The government in October last year lifted a 14-year ban on beef imports from Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands, and local eateries have since launched menus featuring expensive wagyu from Japan to attract diners and boost sales.
Regent Taipei capitalized on the trend with a luxury wagyu dining experience priced at NT$15,800 per person for a nine-course meal.
The 100 seats reserved for the event sold out beforehand and generated NT$2 million in revenue, which included wine pairing selections, Wu said.
Kakiyasu is one of Japan’s oldest restaurant chains, with more than 150 years of history, and owns hot pot, sukiyaki, buffet and dessert stores.
Starting on Friday last week, wagyu lovers with smaller budgets can find relatively more affordable options, such as the NT$3,800 meal at Mihan Honke, or Japanese rice bowl dishes priced from NT$480 to NT$880 at cafe Azie, Wu said.
Wagyu dishes will affirm Regent Taipei’s leadership in the local dining market, Wu said.
Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) has also invested in a project to produce Japanese-style beef using local cattle through experimental breeding techniques.
Lee, who has a doctorate in agricultural economics, is working with a biotechnology firm to raise 20 head of cattle on land rented from Shin Kong Chao Feng Ranch and Resort (新光兆豐農場) in Hualien County to make domestic farming of wagyu-style beef possible within three years.
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
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
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since
purpose: Tesla’s CEO sought to meet senior Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of its ‘full self-driving’ software in China and approval to transfer data they had collected Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk arrived in Beijing yesterday on an unannounced visit, where he is expected to meet senior officials to discuss the rollout of "full self-driving" (FSD) software and permission to transfer data overseas, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Chinese state media reported that he met Premier Li Qiang (李強) in Beijing, during which Li told Musk that Tesla's development in China could be regarded as a successful example of US-China economic and trade cooperation. Musk confirmed his meeting with the premier yesterday with a post on social media platform X. "Honored to meet with Premier Li