Restaurants and hoteliers are focusing on take-out services and selling food via new channels as consumers avoid crowds due to their fear of contracting SARS.
Din Tai Fong (鼎泰豐), a Chinese restaurant on Taipei's Yungkang Street area known for its xiao long bao (steamed pork dumplings), said it had started to sell frozen sticky rice dumplings in Cosco Taiwan since last Sunday.
"Ever since the SARS outbreak started to get worse in late April, we have seen sales decline by nearly 30 percent from [March]," said Kenwaul Hsu (
In the past, people had to take a number and line up at Din Tai Fong. Now, they don't have to make the usual one-hour wait for a table during either lunch or dinner time, Hsu said.
Din Tai Fong is also negotiating with Eastern Home Shopping Network (
Shin Yeh (
"We have seen tremendous sales growth in to-go orders," said Erica Chen (陳臆如), Shin Yeh's deputy marketing manager.
Last month the chain's outlet on the corner of Hsinyi Road and Kuangfu South Road generated NT$16,000 sales from take-out services, accounting for 2 percent of the outlet's total sales.
In addition, Shin Yeh is considering promoting its catering service for the first time.
"We seldom offered catering services before, but now we look at it as a cash cow," Chen added.
Hoteliers are also brainstorming for new business.
"Since the core business is sluggish, we are forced to be more creative for new business models," Evelyn Kung (龔臻瑜), a marketing director at the Howard Plaza Hotel (福華飯店) in Taipei.
Starting Monday, the hotelier set up small booths in front of its main door to sell dim sum during the lunch and dinner rushes.
"The reaction was very impressive," Kung said. "We sold some 200 dim sum meals in less than one hour that day."
Sales at the hotelier's restaurants have dropped 30 percent compared to the same period last year.
The average occupancy rate of hotels in Taipei last month was less than 20 percent, Chen said.
CHIP WAR: Tariffs on Taiwanese chips would prompt companies to move their factories, but not necessarily to the US, unleashing a ‘global cross-sector tariff war’ US President Donald Trump would “shoot himself in the foot” if he follows through on his recent pledge to impose higher tariffs on Taiwanese and other foreign semiconductors entering the US, analysts said. Trump’s plans to raise tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan to as high as 100 percent would backfire, macroeconomist Henry Wu (吳嘉隆) said. He would “shoot himself in the foot,” Wu said on Saturday, as such economic measures would lead Taiwanese chip suppliers to pass on additional costs to their US clients and consumers, and ultimately cause another wave of inflation. Trump has claimed that Taiwan took up to
A start-up in Mexico is trying to help get a handle on one coastal city’s plastic waste problem by converting it into gasoline, diesel and other fuels. With less than 10 percent of the world’s plastics being recycled, Petgas’ idea is that rather than letting discarded plastic become waste, it can become productive again as fuel. Petgas developed a machine in the port city of Boca del Rio that uses pyrolysis, a thermodynamic process that heats plastics in the absence of oxygen, breaking it down to produce gasoline, diesel, kerosene, paraffin and coke. Petgas chief technology officer Carlos Parraguirre Diaz said that in
SUPPORT: The government said it would help firms deal with supply disruptions, after Trump signed orders imposing tariffs of 25 percent on imports from Canada and Mexico The government pledged to help companies with operations in Mexico, such as iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), shift production lines and investment if needed to deal with higher US tariffs. The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday announced measures to help local firms cope with the US tariff increases on Canada, Mexico, China and other potential areas. The ministry said that it would establish an investment and trade service center in the US to help Taiwanese firms assess the investment environment in different US states, plan supply chain relocation strategies and
Japan intends to closely monitor the impact on its currency of US President Donald Trump’s new tariffs and is worried about the international fallout from the trade imposts, Japanese Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato said. “We need to carefully see how the exchange rate and other factors will be affected and what form US monetary policy will take in the future,” Kato said yesterday in an interview with Fuji Television. Japan is very concerned about how the tariffs might impact the global economy, he added. Kato spoke as nations and firms brace for potential repercussions after Trump unleashed the first salvo of
RSS