Luxury hotel Mandarin Oriental Taipei (文華東方酒店) yesterday declined to comment on media reports that its owner, Kai Tai Fung International Co (開泰豐國際), has signed an agreement with a Canadian billionaire to sell the property for NT$38.5 billion (US$1.24 billion).
“Questions about the hotel’s ownership structure should be addressed to the owners,” Kai Tai Fung marketing and communications director Luanne Li (李佳燕) said by telephone.
Mandarin Oriental has a long-term management agreement in place in Taipei, Li said, adding that operations are normal.
The low-key and brief responses came after Chinese-language news outlets reported, without citing sources, that Kai Tai Fung chairman Lin Ming-chun (林命群) has agreed to sell the property to 41-year-old Canadian Calvin Lo (盧啟賢).
The deal has been witnessed by lawyers, the reports said.
Lo is the chief executive officer of Hong Kong-based R.E. Lee International, a life insurance brokerage that specializes in estate planning for ultra-wealthy people.
Under the deal, Lo would buy both the hotel building and 4,200 ping (13,884m2) land, the reports said.
Forbes estimated that Lo, who is currently residing in Hong Kong, had a net worth of US$1.7 billion last year.
Lo has been in talks with Lin since last year and sent his team to conduct due diligence in Taipei several times, the reports said.
Lin reportedly did not relinquish all of his stake in the hotel, but would retain some interest.
Kai Tai Fung declined to comment on the reported deal.
Officials at Mandarin Oriental Taipei, which turned five years old in May, said on condition of anonymity that the reports could prove little more than rumors, as local media had published similar stories in the past.
In 2015, Lin was reported to have sold the hotel to a Chinese buyer for NT$48 billion, a report he dismissed as groundless.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily in July ran a similar report, which Lin again denied at the time.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek (深度求索), seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field. More than a year has passed since the start-up put Chinese AI on the map in early last year with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals. However, despite reports and rumors about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight. Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
RSS