The Fubon Group (富邦集團) will sell its department store business to upscale mall operator Breeze Center (微風廣場) as the retailing business is affected by the nation’s lackluster economic growth, the company said yesterday.
The planned termination of the three-year-old Momo Department Store (Momo 百貨) on Nanjing E Road in Taipei also reflects the increasingly fierce competition in this line of business in Taiwan, the Fubon Multimedia Technology Co (富邦媒體科技), a subsidiary of the group, said in a statement yesterday.
DAYS AWAY
“The company’s board has approved the end of its department store operations, which is expected to be taken over by the Breeze Center in coming days,” Fubon Multimedia said in the statement.
Besides Fubon group, other shareholders in the company include South Korean retail giant Lotte Shopping Co and Taiwan’s Teco Group (東元集團).
The company did not provide detailed financial terms nor the exact timeframe for the business to be handed over to Breeze. Domestic retailers are facing an increasingly difficult environment amid a weakening economy, which has caused consumers to be reluctant to spend.
RELUCTANT SPENDING
In the first half of the year, total department store sales grew only 0.9 percent to NT$130.9 billion (US$4.38 billion), the Ministry of Economic Affairs said last month. Fubon Multimedia, which also operates the Momo TV shopping channel and online shopping Web site, as well as Momo personal care and drugstore chain, said competition is becoming more severe among department store operators in Taiwan, where major players have expanded the scale of their business and are using the franchise model in order to stay competitive. “The smaller-scale Momo Department Store has also faced weakening profitability because of suppressed consumer spending in recent years,” the company’s chairman Howard Lin (林福星) said in the statement.
Following the closure of its physical department store outlets, the company will reallocate company resources into its virtual retail channels and aims to build a global platform in the future, Lin said.
The company’s retail business reported NT$18.7 billion in sales last year, up 19.87 percent from NT$15.6 billion in 2011. Sales for this year are expected to exceed NT$20 billion mark, according to the company.
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
HSBC Holdings PLC is deepening its commitment to Taiwan as the economy emerges as one of the bank’s fastest-growing markets globally, driven by an artificial intelligence (AI) investment boom, expanding cross-border trade, and rising wealth creation. “The advantage that Taiwan has is a growth story linked to the semiconductor and broader AI industries, strong underlying corporate performance, and wealth creation,” said Surendra Rosha, HSBC’s co-chief executive for Asia and the Middle East, in an exclusive interview with the Taipei Times on June 2, during this year’s HSBC Taiwan Conference. That combination has helped HSBC cement its position as the most profitable international
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday said it would work with US chipmaker Intel Corp to jointly develop and deploy next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and intelligent computing platforms in a move to capture booming demand for AI computing systems. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康), said in a statement that the partnership would combine its global manufacturing scale, system integration expertise and AI data center deployment capabilities with Intel’s strengths in processor architecture, silicon technologies and software ecosystem. The companies said they plan to work on equipment used in AI data centers, including server racks powered by
RSS