The Landis Taipei (台北亞都麗緻飯店) is negotiating with its employees about a plan to introduce unpaid leave as its business suffers amid the COVID-19 pandemic, hotel management said in a statement yesterday.
The statement was the hotel’s response to a Chinese-language media report the previous day that said the Landis Hospitality Group (麗緻餐旅集團) on April 1 would introduce a three-month plan under which employees would take six days of unpaid leave per month.
It is the latest move by the group to offset declining guest numbers following the closure of the Landis Taichung (台中亞都麗緻飯店) on Monday last week, the report said.
Landis Taipei said in the statement that it is still discussing the plan with its employees and would reveal the details once an agreement is reached.
“It is necessary to have staff consent” before cutting working hours, the statement said, expressing the hope that employees would understand the difficult situation the company is in.
The provisional furlough policy would be rescinded if business recovers quicker than expected, the statement said.
With the closure of the Landis Taichung, the Landis Group has five local hotels and resorts: the Landis Taipei, the Tayih Landis Hotel Tainan (台南大億麗緻酒店), Pause Landis Resorts (璞石麗緻溫泉會館) in New Taipei City’s Wulai District (烏來), the Landis Resort Yangmingshan (陽明山中國麗緻大飯店) in Taipei and the Landis Inn Chuhu (竹湖暐順麗緻文旅) in Hsinchu City.
Landis Group business development division assistant general manager Gary Lo (羅明威) attributed the closure of Landis Taichung after 13 years to the economic slowdown, surging rental fees and operational costs, as well as the impact of the pandemic.
“We never made enough to cover our losses,” Lo said.
Landis Taipei shares fell 1.45 percent to close at NT$21.50 on Friday last week. There were no trades yesterday.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained