E-commerce operator Momo.com Inc (富邦媒體) on Tuesday announced the construction of 10 satellite warehouses and a logistics center in southern Taiwan.
The infrastructure upgrades would help to lower costs and shorten shipping times for packages delivered to southern Taiwan, the company said at a media gathering.
“These new logistics upgrades will elevate our ability to deliver all across Taiwan,” Momo chairman Lin Chi-feng (林啟峰) said. “We anticipate the southern logistics center to begin operations in 2023.”
Photo: CNA
The firm launched its subsidiary Fu Sheng Logistics Co (富昇物流) in May last year so that it could operate its own fleet of delivery vehicles.
“We hope to increase the percentage of deliveries completed by Fu Sheng to 15 percent this year,” Lin said.
Northern Taiwan accounts for 60 percent of Momo’s orders, while central and southern Taiwan each account for 20 percent.
However, the company’s main logistics center and warehouse are in the north.
Packages destined for the south are dispatched from the northern logistics center, which is inefficient, the company said.
Momo has benefitted from the shift in consumer behavior driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, as consolidated revenue last year increased 29.65 percent year-on-year to reach a record NT$67.2 billion (US$2.37 billion) from NT$51.83 billion in 2019.
Thanks to improving operational efficiency and economies of scale, net profit last year increased 39.48 percent to NT$1.94 billion from NT$1.39 billion in 2019, with earnings per share rising from NT$9.95 to NT$13.87, company data showed.
On Tuesday, PChome Online Inc (網路家庭) announced that it would launch a share buyback program to reward employees, and proposed distributing a cash dividend of NT$1.3 per share to shareholders, which would represent a payout ratio of 60.19 percent.
PChome Online said that its board of directors approved a plan to buy back 1.5 million shares, or 1.27 percent of its outstanding shares, on the open market for NT$60 to NT$100 per share from yesterday to May 16.
The company added that it plans to reward employees with the repurchased shares over the next five years.
The e-commerce company reported that net profit last year increased 55.63 percent to NT$252.79 million from NT$162.44 million in 2019, with earnings per share increasing to NT$2.16 from NT$1.39.
Revenue last year increased 12.82 percent to a record NT$43.87 billion from NT$38.88 billion in 2019, company data showed.
This year, the company said that it aims to increase its customer base by offering points-based incentives, and to expand offline channels, from large chains to small stores.
This time was supposed to be different. The memorychip sector, famous for its boom-and-bust cycles, had changed its ways. A combination of more disciplined management and new markets for its products — including 5G technology and cloud services — would ensure that companies delivered more predictable earnings. Yet, less than a year after memory companies made such pronouncements, the US$160 billion industry is suffering one of its worst routs ever. There is a glut of the chips sitting in warehouses, customers are cutting orders and product prices have plunged. “The chip industry thought that suppliers were going to have better control,” said
Enimmune Corp (安特羅生技) has obtained marketing approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its EnVAX-A71 vaccine for enterovirus 71 (EV-71), becoming the nation’s first enterovirus vaccine completely made in Taiwan, it said yesterday. After spending 13 years and NT$1.5 billion (US$49.77 million) on the research and development of the vaccine, Enimmune plans to start manufacturing and marketing it by the end of March, the company said in a statement, without disclosing customer order figures. “It is possible that the vaccine would not be included in a national vaccination program initially, and consumers would need to pay for it themselves,” parent
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining