Experts and company leaders yesterday said that the nation’s tourism and hospitality industries are expected to grow moderately next year, with the potential to exceed the nation’s GDP growth rate threefold, despite the current economic downturn.
“The tourism and hospitality sectors are highly resilient to shifts in economic cycles, as we have found that people are reluctant to cut travel spending during lean times,” Phoenix Tours International Inc (鳳凰國際旅行社) president Jimmy Chang (張金明) said at a forum event organized by the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (中華經濟研究院).
“While we are not expecting a red-hot high season, sales are not likely to dip sharply in the low season either,” he added while commenting on the government’s discouraging GDP growth forecast of 0.9 percent for this quarter.
“Unlike the technology or manufacturing sector, gains in the tourism and hospitality industries are not dominated by a few giants, and serve as a catalyst for other industries, such as airlines and retail, and is an important aspect of Taiwan’s economy and a major job-creator,” Chang said.
Chang said that tourism industry prospects remain sound and that currently there are about 10 travel agencies looking to be listed on the local bourse.
Howard Beach Resort Kenting (墾丁福華渡假飯店) general manager Chang Chi-kuang (張積光) said that following deregulation allowing Chinese tourists in Taiwan, banks and real-estate agencies soon established a presence in the Kenting area.
Chang said that when provided with appropriate impetus, consumers are likely to spend.
“During consecutive holidays spanning across three or four days, we see our revenues surging threefold,” he said.
However, Chang Chi-kuang said that January’s presidential race might stir up political issues that could significantly lower the number of Chinese visitors, while Jimmy Chang said that the stalemate over the cross-strait trade in services agreement had led to countless lost opportunities.
Taipei 101 president Chou Te-yu (周德宇) and Sun Kuo-hua (孫國華), chairman of Vigor Kobo (維格餅家), a bakery that focuses on traditional cakes and pastries, said that the nation’s tourism and hospitality sectors must compete by elevating quality as opposed to striving for quantity.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) and Episil Technologies Inc (漢磊) yesterday announced plans to jointly build an 8-inch fab to produce silicon carbide (SiC) chips through an equity acquisition deal. SiC chips offer higher efficiency and lower energy loss than pure silicon chips, and they are able to operate at higher temperatures. They have become crucial to the development of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, green energy storage and industrial devices. Vanguard, a contract chipmaker focused on making power management chips and driver ICs for displays, is to acquire a 13 percent stake in Episil for NT$2.48 billion (US$77.1 million).
RSS