Formosa International Hotels Corp (
Following negotiations which lasted around half a year, Formosa International, operator of the Grand Formosa Regent Taipei, approved the buyout plan at a board meeting yesterday. The NT$500 million (US$15.4 million) cash transaction is expected to be completed by early next year.
"We're very happy to have the best pizza operation team in Taiwan and China joining us," Steven Pan (潘思亮), chairman of the hotel firm, said at a press conference.
PHOTO: TSENG HUI-WEN, TAIPEI TIMES
He said that Formosa International would pay NT$470 million to absorb the pizza chain's 115 stores in Taiwan and NT$30 million to take over its seven outlets in Beijing.
Shares of Formosa International dropped 2.19 percent to close at NT$98.3 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
With the local Domino's management team, led by managing director Scott Oelkers, having won kudos from its Michigan-based headquarters for making Taiwan one of its fastest-growing markets, Pan said that the pizza chain would maintain independent operations.
The brand name will be kept intact and the original team will stay on board, he said.
Pan said that there would not be any layoffs.
Instead, the company will initiate an active expansion policy in Taiwan, as well as Beijing and Shanghai, the two Chinese cities in which the world's second-largest pizza-delivery company has obtained authorization to operate, he said.
Formosa International expects to learn from the effective management system, personnel education programs and distribution networks employed by Domino's to help expand its food and beverage business, said Amy Hsueh (
To ensure that consumers' growing appetite for fast food will be satisfied, Oelkers has laid out an aggressive plan for the near future.
"Within the next three years, we plan to open 30 to 40 stores in Shanghai and Beijing. In Taiwan, we can continue to add five to 10 stores per year," he said.
Domino's set up its first pizza delivery store in Taiwan in 1989 and rapidly expanded between 1995 and 1997 at a tremendous rate of 20 store-openings per year.
The chain has quickly boosted its market presence by launching a series of pun-filled commercials in which Oelkers uses creative slogans in fluent Mandarin to establish public awareness of the Domino's brand name and phone number.
Domino's is expected to post double-digit growth this year, with revenues estimated to approach NT$1.6 billion, up from last year's NT$1.4 billion, in both Taiwan and Beijing. Its gross margin will increase from 4 percent last year to 6 percent this year, general manager Engin Huang (
In a Taiwanese pizza market valued at US$200 million per year, the chain claims to have a share of more than 50 percent in the delivery segment and nearly 50 percent in the carry-out segment.
Unfazed by the Domino's development strategy, the market leader, Pizza Hut, remains optimistic about its domestic sales growth, although it said Taiwan has become a mature market.
"We'll continue with store expansion and I believe our number of stores and turnover will stay above that of Domino's," said Felisa Wu (
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS