The Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) yesterday inked a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Tiki, Vietnam’s second-largest e-commerce platform, in a move to expand digital sales channels for Taiwanese companies in Southeast Asia.
“Vietnamese customers are savvy about what they want,” Tiki founder and customer experience officer Tran Ngoc Thai Son said at a signing ceremony in Taipei, adding that Vietnam is a growing market with great potential.
Cosmetics, such as face masks supplied by Dr Wu Skincare Co Ltd (達爾膚生醫科技), should quickly grab the attention of young Vietnamese, he told the Taipei Times.
“The e-commerce platform should lend firm support to small and medium-sized Taiwanese companies that hope to expand their business in Vietnam, which has a population of more than 90 million people,” TAITRA chairman James Huang (黃志芳) said, citing high market acceptance of Taiwanese-made products in that country.
TAITRA also plans to outline a roadmap for Taiwanese businesspeople to tap into Vietnam’s market, helping them to deal with logistics and cash flow problems when conducting cross-border transactions, Huang said.
The Vietnamese e-commerce operator on Thursday opened a Taiwan Pavilion on its platform, which displays various types of products, ranging from Taiwan’s high mountain tea to garments and home appliances.
This marks another move by the government-backed council to build connections with Southeast Asian e-commerce operators after it teamed up with Blibli.com, the largest online shopping platform in Indonesia.
A Taiwan-themed pavilion on Blibli.com, established in September last year, now offers more than 1,900 items, TAITRA 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
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