Gloria Hotel Group (華泰大飯店集團) is to shut down its 50-year-old Gloria Prince Hotel (華泰王子大飯店) in Taipei’s Zhongshan District (中山) next month to pave the way for an urban renewal project and cut losses amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The hotel on Linsen N Road said on its Web site that it would cease operations on Oct. 11, in line with the group’s plan to maximize the property’s value.
The announcement came after several local peers, including Leofoo Hotel (六福客棧), Ambassador Hotel Taipei (台北國賓飯店), the Sherwood Taipei (西華飯店), San Want Hotel (神旺大飯店) and Imperial Hotel Taipei (台北華國大飯店), made similar moves.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
Tourist hotels have been affected most heavily by border controls and quarantine requirements that have kept foreign tourists away for most of the past three years. Occupancy rates at popular properties put up decent showings on weekends and holidays, but remained soft on weekdays.
Gloria Prince, allied with Japan’s Seibu Group, has focused on serving group and individual tourists from the neighboring country. To hedge losses, it relocated its Lidiot (驢子) and Chiou Hwa (九華樓) restaurants to Taipei’s Dazhi (大直) area.
The group also owns hotel brands Gloria Residence (華泰瑞舍), Hotel Quote and Hotel Proverbs in Taipei, resort property Gloria Manor (華泰瑞苑) in Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁), and Gloria Outlets (華泰名品城).
The group is reportedly planning to collaborate with UT Land Development Group (忠泰建設) to turn Gloria Prince into a mixed-use complex with 21 floors above ground and 6 basement floors.
The upcoming complex would feature a new hotel with 100 guestrooms and set aside the remaining floors as upscale office spaces that could come into service in 2026 if work on regeneration starts next year.
The two sides seek to extend the urban renewal project to neighboring apartments, pending their owners agreement to participate.
The government has encouraged regeneration projects by granting favorable floor space ratios and sparing them of credit controls as it seeks to enhance building safety and stimulate domestic demand.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by