Online food delivery platform Uber Eats yesterday announced that it would quit Hong Kong at the end of the year, ending five years of battling for a share of the territory’s food delivery market.
Uber announced the “difficult decision” in an online statement, which gave no reason for why it was winding down operations.
The firm said it would redouble its commitment to its ride-sharing unit in Hong Kong, a business that remains in a legal gray area.
Launched in 2016, Uber Eats was a latecomer to Hong Kong’s food delivery sector, where Foodpanda and Deliveroo had a head start and have since become the two dominant players.
Uber Eats cornered only 5 percent of the market, compared with Deliveroo’s 44 percent and Foodpanda’s 51 percent, data platform Measurable AI said.
Hong Kong was one of the first international cities where Uber Technologies Inc’s core ride-sharing business set up shop as it rapidly expanded outside the US.
In a territory with a reputation for less-than-accommodating taxi drivers who often refuse rides and only accept cash, the app became a major success with many Hong Kongers.
However, Uber has faced staunch opposition from local taxi groups and a government that has declined to legalize the ride-sharing industry.
In 2018, 24 Uber drivers were convicted and fined for carrying passengers without a hire-car permit and their appeal was dismissed two years later.
Uber continues to operate and police enforcement is patchy, with periodic crackdowns.
The platform has begun including taxis and earlier this year, it bought up local app HK Taxi, a move that it said it hoped would lead to the legalization of its operations.
In October, on its seventh anniversary in Hong Kong, Uber said that it had 216,000 registered Hong Kong drivers, who made up more than 25 percent of its global business.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”