Chailease Holding Co (中租控股), the nation’s No. 1 leasing services provider, aims to enter the Indonesian market this year to expand its presence in Southeast Asia, top executives said on Wednesday.
“We are looking to enter Indonesia this year and assess the possibility of tapping markets in Myanmar and Laos,” said Chailease Group chairman Andre Koo (辜仲立), whose business interests also include Grand Pacific Investment & Development Holding Co (中時控股), Chailease International Finance Co (仲利國際), the Park City Hotel chain (成旅晶贊) and others.
Chailiese Holding has operations in Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and China.
It posted NT$4.05 billion (US$138.4 million) in revenue for last month, an increase of 21 percent from a year earlier, the company said in a statement.
For the first three months of the year, accumulated revenue reached NT$11.5 billion, 23 percent higher than the same period last year.
Operations in China and Southeast Asia picked up the fastest with gains of 38 percent and 25 percent respectively, it said.
Chailese Holding is expanding to serve clients with capital needs in other markets, company chairman Albert Chen (陳鳳龍) said.
The firm is adding offices in Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand to meet demand, Chen said.
Koo, who has a passion for fine dining and wine, told reporters that after four years of negotiations he has won the dealership rights to a Burgundy through an affiliate, Les Terroirs de Chailese (中時泰樂瓦).
The new unit also offers clients space and equipment for wine collecting, Koo said.
While he is interested in expanding in the hospitality industry, Koo said he would not consider taking over the Westin Taipei site, whose operator announced plans to exit the market by the end of the year, citing high rental costs.
“We prefer locations that are more affordable,” Koo added.
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],”
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
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