The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it is working on a subsidy program to help struggling restaurants reduce the costs charged by third-party food delivery providers during the COVID-19 outbreak.
The ministry yesterday met with representatives of restaurants, night markets and travel agencies, the third meeting it has held in its attempts to assist the affected sectors during the outbreak.
To mitigate the impact of the outbreak, restaurants have been turning to food delivery platforms, such as Uber Eats, Foodpanda and Deliveroo, to boost sales, but the approach comes at a cost — the providers charge commission fees that are 30 to 40 percent the cost of the delivery.
“We are drafting measures to subsidize commission fees as restaurants are suffering,” Minister of Economic Affairs Shen Jong-chin (沈榮津) told reporters after the meeting. “They [restaurant owners] have been advised to negotiate with [food delivery platforms] to cut the commission fees. Together with government help, they could save money. The ministry can help with this.”
Restaurants are hoping to at least halve the fees, Shen said.
The owners of food stalls in Taipei’s Ningxia Night Market (寧夏夜市) have reached an agreement with food delivery platforms to cut the commission to 10 to 30 percent, he said.
The ministry has set up a special budget of NT$160 million (US$5.29 million) to subsidize food delivery fees for about 11,000 small restaurants, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) reported yesterday.
The subsidy would be capped at NT$15,000 for each restaurant, the report said.
At the meeting, the ministry was urged to issue “stimulus coupons” as soon as possible to boost consumption, Shen said.
Businesses also urged the government to cut electricity and water rates, as well as taxes, he said.
They also called on the government to temporarily relax the regulations on working hours to help businesses weather the impact of the outbreak, Shen added.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS