Pinkoi.com, a Taipei-based start-up that operates an online marketplace for designers to sell their products via mobile applications and Web sites, yesterday said it plans to strengthen its foothold in nine overseas markets this year.
“This year would be the year for Pinkoi to aggressively expand our presence in overseas markets,” Pinkoi cofounder and chief executive officer Peter Yen (顏君庭) told a news conference.
Pinkoi, founded by three Taiwanese and registered in Hong Kong in August 2011, offers a platform that allows fledgling designers to sell their products, ranging from clothing, accessories and bags to shoes and lifestyle items.
The company showcased about 100,000 listed items from 5,000 designers in October 2013, but this year it has 500,000 products from more than 25,000 designers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand, Pinkoi said.
Over the past four years, 1.94 million items were sold on Pinkoi’s platform and the company said it has helped designers to reach the international stage.
Pinkoi recently completed a second round of fundraising, with US$9 million in capital from Sequoia India and GMO VenturePartners.
The company said it plans to utilize part of the funds for overseas expansion this year, including hiring more employees at its branches in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok and San Francisco, as well as opening a fifth branch in Shanghai.
To further develop the Japanese market, Pinkoi said it has partnered with iichi.com, a Japanese online marketplace for handmade products, to include 20,000 Japanese designers under Pinkoi’s wing.
The company is also to target English-speaking markets in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and Canada with more marketing resources, a Pinkoi public relations official said.
Consumers can use six local currencies for shopping on Pinkoi, while local payment methods in the targeted markets and an international order tracking system are also to be implemented.
In the meantime, Pinkoi plans to introduce a new management system for designers to manage their stock and gain access to data, including sales history and page views, the official said.
“The data could help designers customize marketing activities according to customer location. We will also host online and offline workshops to guide designers in global marketing,” she said.
Pinkoi foresees strong growth from overseas markets and expects revenue from outside Taiwan to jump by 200 percent from last year, the company said, declining to disclose figures.
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
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
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS