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.
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