Eslite Group (誠品集團) aims to increase group revenue by between 10 percent and 15 percent over the next five years on the back of planned expansion in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, chairman Robert Wu (吳清友) said yesterday.
The group, which runs bookstores, galleries and department stores, reported a consolidated revenue of NT$13 billion (US$427.98 million) for last year.
Sales for this year could break the NT$14 billion mark, Wu told a media briefing in Taipei after celebrating the group’s 25th anniversary.
Photo: Chang Hui-wen, Taipei Times
The group is set to open its first boutique hotel, with 104 rooms, in Taipei’s Songshan Cultural and Creative Park in the second quarter, and plans to launch its first two department stores in China in the second quarter next year, in Suzhou and Shanghai.
“The outlet in Suzhou may be a department store as large as the company’s flagship outlet in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義),” said Eslite Spectrum Corp (誠品生活) president Mercy Wu (吳旻潔), who is also vice chairwoman of the Eslite Group and Robert Wu’s daughter.
Eslite Spectrum operates department stores and restaurants. The subsidiary also plays an important role in the group’s overall growth and business strategy.
In the long term, the group plans to launch two or three outlets per year in Taiwan and at least one store in an overseas market, most likely in China and Hong Kong, she said.
The group is also eyeing opportunities to operate and manage a city-level cultural complex in China, she added.
Eslite Spectrum reported consolidated sales in the first two months of the year of NT$587.63 million, up 7.83 percent from a year earlier. Its overall revenue for last year stood at NT$3.44 billion, up 15.26 percent from 2012.
The company posted a net profit of NT$234.14 million, or NT$5.24 per share, for the first nine months last year, up from a net income of NT$157.77 million, or NT$3.85 per share, recorded a year earlier.
UNWANTED ATTENTION: In the past two months, the automaker has made headlines, with a Chinese military ban of its vehicles and a protest at an expo Electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc, facing scrutiny in China over safety and customer service complaints, is boosting its engagement with regulators and beefing up its government relations team, industry sources said. Tesla’s change of strategy leading to more behind-the-scenes interaction with policymakers in Beijing compared with relatively little previously shows the seriousness with which the US automaker views the setbacks in its second-biggest market. TALKING SHOP It also comes at a time when China is trying to regulate large and powerful private companies, especially in the technology sector, on concerns about their market dominance. As they do elsewhere, regulators in China, the world’s biggest
Chinese electric vehicle (EV) start-up Nio Inc (蔚來) reported a narrower first-quarter loss, while warning that a global chip shortage would keep a lid on deliveries. The Shanghai-based company posted a net loss of 451 million yuan (US$68.8 million) in the three months ended March 31, compared with 1.69 billion yuan a year earlier, it said in a statement. It also marked an improvement on the 1.39 billion yuan net loss it posted in the fourth quarter of last year. Revenue rose to 7.98 billion yuan, beating estimates of 7.16 billion yuan. Nio delivered 20,060 vehicles in the quarter, a 423 percent increase from
Dell Technologies Inc has agreed to sell its Boomi cloud business to private equity firms Francisco Partners and TPG in a cash deal valued at US$4 billion, as part of efforts by chief executive officer Michael Dell to trim down the PC maker. The deal is expected to close by the end of this year, the companies said in a statement on Sunday without providing additional details of the terms. Dow Jones had earlier reported that the companies were near a deal. Boomi specializes in integrating different cloud platforms for companies and has more than 15,000 customers. Dell agreed to acquire the company for
Intel Corp wants 8 billion euros (US$9.7 billion) in public subsidies toward building a semiconductor factory in Europe, chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger was cited as saying on Friday, as the region seeks to reduce its reliance on imports amid a shortage of supplies. The pitch is the first time that Gelsinger has publicly put a figure on how much state aid he would want, as Intel campaigns to take on Asian rivals in contract manufacturing. “What we’re asking from both the US and the European governments is to make it competitive for us to do it here, compared to in Asia,”
RSS