TOPBI International Holdings Ltd (淘帝國際控股), a leading children’s clothing brand in China, on Wednesday reported a positive outlook for the second quarter, as it is peak season for children’s apparel.
The company, which trades its shares on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, said that it plans to hold more promotional activities, release new designs for Chinese Children’s Day on June 1 and attend Hikid Fashion Week later this year.
TOPBI also plans to launch a new “mini topbi” brand for one to three-year-olds later this year through e-commerce platforms, a move that aims to achieve product differentiation and raise selling prices, it said.
“Since TOPBI accounts for only 1 percent of [the children’s clothing] market in China and there are no dominant players in the market, we believe there is room for expansion,” a TOPBI public relations official told the Taipei Times.
The official asked to remain anonymous.
The company has opened more than 100 outlets in China in the past two years and has nearly 1,700 stores in total.
Physical stores accounted for more than 90 percent of last quarter’s total revenue of NT$1.34 billion, while e-commerce contributed 7 percent, up from 4 percent a year earlier, the company said.
Most parents still prefer shopping at physical stores, but a rising number of young parents are shopping online, the company said.
The children’s clothing market in China is forecast to grow to NT$802.4 billion (US$25.96 billion) this year, TOPBI said.
As average consumption of infant products has been increasing over the past few years, the company would also keep expanding its online-to-offline channels, it said.
Net profit last quarter climbed 4.3 percent to NT$224.6 million, a record for the period, TOPBI said.
Earnings per share rose 4.18 percent to NT$2.74, compared with NT$2.63 a year earlier, while gross margin improved from 38.71 percent to 40 percent, it added.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS