Huang Hsiang Construction Co (皇翔建設) has joined the trend of expanding into the hospitality industry and cutting dependence on property development to cope with a sluggish housing market.
The Taipei-based company made known its intentions to diversify its sources of income at a shareholders’ meeting, where the company attributed its lackluster showing last year to a series of unfavorable government policies.
“We aim to set up three hotels run by international brands in the coming three years to guarantee long-term regular income,” Huang Hsiang chairman Liao Nian-ji (廖年吉) told shareholders, who approved a cash dividend of NT$1.2 per share.
Only NT$0.2 of the payout will come from NT$91 million (US$2.8 million) in net income last year, or earnings per share of NT$0.28 per share, a plunge of 95 percent from earnings per share of NT$5.6 in 2014. The statutory reserve is to fund the rest of the payout scheme.
Huang Hsiang has entered a partnership with US hospitality provider Marriott International Inc to operate two five-star hotels in Taipei’s Shilin (士林) and Datong (大同) districts.
The developer has also inked a leasing contract with Japan’s Fujita Kanko Inc, allowing the hotel chain to set up a Hotel Gracery outlet in the capital’s Zhongcheng District (中正) .
Built on a 1,216 ping (4012.8m2), plot of land, the planned hotel in Shilin is to feature 150 guest rooms that could open for business in the third quarter of next year, Liao said, adding that his company won the superfices right for the land a few years earlier.
The developer is waiting for approval for a planned hotel on another 1,376 ping plot, on the former site of a bus station in Datong, a Huang Hsiang spokeswoman Yu Yuh-hwa (游玉華) said.
The hotel might begin operations in 2019 under the brand name Renaissance, she said.
The hotel in Zhongcheng is to have 248 rooms and will be aimed at business travelers given its location, Yu said.
The four-star hotel could start operations in 2019, generating stable rental yields of between 5 percent and 6 percent for Huang Hsiang.
From this quarter onward, the builder has started to benefit from the delivery of housing projects in Taoyuan from previous years. That explained why the company posted NT$3.05 billion in revenue last month with cumulative revenues rising above NT$10 billion for the first five months, more than 15 times of the amount during the same period last year, Yu said.
However, Huang Hsiang has no intention of launching new housing projects this year on expectations the market will remain gloomy for the next two years, Liao said.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
POWER FORWARD: The US company’s bullish revenue projection also lifted the shares of Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC and Japanese equipment supplier Advantest Nvidia Corp’s forecast for surging revenue surprised even the most bullish analysts on Wall Street, propelling the chipmaker to the cusp of a US$1 trillion market capitalization and igniting a global jump in stocks linked to artificial intelligence (AI). The Santa Clara, California-based company gained as much as 29 percent in extended US trading, on course for a record high, after saying it expects sales to reach about US$11 billion in the three months ending July. That gain puts Nvidia on track also to rack up the biggest one-day valuation jump in US company history. Nvidia, the biggest supplier of the advanced
RSS