Pi Mobile Technology Inc (拍付國際), a subsidiary of PChome Online Inc (網路家庭), yesterday launched new offering with E.Sun Bank (玉山銀行) to court clients as they seek to catch up with rivals in the payment market.
Pi wallet credit card holders can expect bonus credits equivalent to 1 percent of their income tax in PChome’s P-coins with a cap of 2,000 P-coins if they pay their income taxes with co-branded credit cards this year, Pi and bank officials said at a news conference yesterday.
The lender issued the credit card in August last year to tap the mobile payment market.
A 2.5 percent P-coin return rate is offered with any purchase, while a 3 percent return rate is offered from today to Aug. 31 with purchases made abroad as Pi looks to boost its credit card usage.
In related news, a credit card issued by CTBC Bank Co (中國信託銀行) in partnership with Line Pay offers a 1 percent return rate in Line points, a decline from the 2 percent return rate offered last year.
Line Pay yesterday said that it would cancel expiration dates for redeeming Line points issued from the CTBC credit card from Wednesday next week.
CTBC bank in February was ahead of its peers with more than 6 million Line Pay credit cards issued, while E.Sun Bank had almost 5 million Pi wallet credit cards, data showed.
PChome chairman Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志) said that the company has issued more than 800 million P-coins since last year through various mechanisms, with each P-coin equal to NT$1.
“We expect to issue about 2 billion [P-coins] this year” Jan added.
PChome said 55 percent of P-coins have been redeemed offline, while the remaining 45 percent are redeemed online.
The company said that its clients can now redeem P-coins at more than 55,000 physical stores.
The company is also aggressively expanding the P-coins’ offline ecosystem into various areas, such as department stores, highway rest areas, fast food chains, cafes, beverage stores, bookstores and restaurants, as well as seeking partnerships with YoWoo Food Delivery (有無外送), Edenred Taiwan (宜睿票券), Syntrend Creative Park (三創生活園區) and Hsin Tung Yang Co (新東陽).
Pi Mobile chief operating officer Luke Han (韓昆舉) said that the company is planning to partner with Uni-President Group (統一集團 ) in the second half of the year and with another subsidiary of PChome, consumer-to-consumer platform Ruten.com (露天拍賣).
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day