Manhattan Portage (MP) bags — one of the world’s most popular fashion accessories — are 100 percent made in Taiwan, according to MP CEO Lin Su-hwei (林淑惠), who herself is from Taiwan.
Lin has been selected by the Crain’s New York Business journal as one of its top entrepreneurs of the year, a title given to honor business leaders’ spirit of never stopping “innovating and growing, even when facing an unpredictable economy or a challenge as tough as Hurricane Sandy.”
Her success is turning the Manhattan messenger bags into a global hit. Asked how, Lin said she believes it is her insistence on staying in style and using high-quality materials.
“Manhattan Portage is iconic — they were the first real brand to make a messenger bag into something that was contemporary, sleek and functional,” said Emily Blumenthal, founder of the Independent Handbag Designer Awards.
One key to the company’s expansion came from Lin’s decision as CEO to move beyond the messenger bag while staying true to the brand’s roots, Crain’s said.
Last year, a client took a 30-year-old MP backpack to the company for repair, Lin said. This shows that their bags “are so durable that are hardly worn out after 30 years of use,” she said.
To maintain such high quality, Lin, who moved to New York from Taiwan in 1991, went back to her homeland where she located reliable factories.
After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, she started to weigh the feasibility of relocating MP factories from the US to Asia, Lin said.
At the start, she worked with manufacturers in the Philippines, Vietnam and China, but because they upheld different standards, she frequently had to travel between the US and Asia to check on the quality of every shipment, she said.
Eventually, she continued, “I got sickened.”
As a result, she decided in 2009 to close the factories in the Philippines and China and relocate production to Changhua County.
Taiwan makes top-quality products, according to Lin.
“Sometimes our factories demand a higher quality than even I ask for,” Lin said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS