Pizza Hut, the world’s largest pizza chain, yesterday opened a new enhanced dine-in (EDI) restaurant in Taipei, and plans to open five such restaurants in three years as part of the company’s plan to diversify its current delivery and all-you-can-eat buffet businesses in Taiwan.
The new EDI restaurant will target young office workers with its casual dining ambiance. The average price per patron is estimated at NT$400.
Felisa Wu (吳玉屏), marketing director at Jardine Food Services (Taiwan) Co (富利食品), which operates 144 Pizza Hut restaurants in Taiwan, said business went down 20 percent in the third quarter because of cautious consumer spending.
The nation’s restaurant sales dropped 4.74 percent in September from a year earlier to NT$24.3 billion (US$739 million) amid typhoons, the tainted-milk scandal and the global financial crisis, the Ministry of Economic Affairs reported on Oct. 22.
For the first nine months of the year, total restaurant sales rose 3.82 percent year-on-year to NT$249.1 billion, ministry data showed.
Meanwhile, a gauge of consumer confidence dropped to a new low last month, indicating that consumers remained highly skeptical of the nation’s economic outlook, according to a monthly survey released by National Central University on Monday last week.
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
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