US-based WeWork Companies Inc, which is rebranding to The We Co, on Thursday announced its entry into Taiwan, starting with an office-sharing business at a building in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義).
The company has targeted several floors in a building on Songren Road and said that it is in talks with potential tenants, WeWork Asia vice chairman Christian Lee told a news conference in Taipei.
With a significant number of innovative start-ups in the Xinyi District, Lee said that his team would seek out partnerships, without giving names.
The company also did not provide its sales target for the local market or plans for other cities in Taiwan.
Founded in 2010, WeWork mainly leases real estate such as office buildings and designs shared workspaces for individuals and enterprises.
The company has quickly expanded to 28 countries and now boasts 485 locations in 105 cities from the Americas to Asia.
“Around 40 percent of our members in Asia-Pacific are large enterprises, and the remaining 60 percent are small companies with less than 10 employees,” Lee said, adding that the company has more than 400,000 members.
While the company boasts members from Fortune 500 companies, up to one-third of which are using WeWork, Lee said his company presents an advantage to smaller companies.
“You can just walk in an office and start working without signing a five-year lease... That’s a huge time-saver for small companies,” he said.
The company, which counts Japan’s Softbank Group Corp among its major investors, last year doubled its revenue to US$1.82 billion thanks to overseas sales, while also doubling its losses to US$1.93 billion, Bloomberg News reported.
Almost half of the company’s first-quarter revenue of US$728 million came from overseas sales, up from 38 percent last year, while losses totaled US$264 million in the quarter, Bloomberg 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
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