Swire Coca-Cola Taiwan Ltd yes-terday signed a preliminary agreement with the Ten Ren Tea Co (
The agreement calls for Coca-Cola to manage manufacturing and sales while Ten Ren will supply the raw materials and its trademark, starting this summer.
The oolong and green tea drinks will be packaged in 500cc bottles to appeal to the younger generation.
Recent market growth has been in green tea, which is one reason the companies chose the flavor, said Chuang Yuan-ming (
An industry watcher said the instant-tea market is still lucrative even though its market share already commands 34.6 percent of all beverage sales.
In the period from March last year until February, tea-beverage sales domestically topped NT$1.58 trillion, with green tea accounting for the lion's share of that amount at 32 percent, up from 29 percent in the previous year, Desmond Wang (王道恆), communication manager of ACNielsen Taiwan, said yesterday.
Although oolong tea accounts for 11 percent of all sales, profit from the mountain tea grew 19 percent compared with the same period last year, making it a competitive product, Wang said.
Hung Shih-ming (洪士民), public affairs manager at market leader Uni-President Enterprises Corp (統一企業), says it's not worried about the competition.
"We'd like to see them join the battle, since they will also provide an impetus for us to improve our products and marketing strategies," Hung said.
Swire Coca-Cola Taiwan and Ten Ren Tea are already looking beyond the domestic market.
"If the market share of our product reaches a certain level, we want to expand the products to other places in Asia such as China, Hong Kong and Singa-pore," said William Hsu (許偉倫), external affairs manager at Coca-Cola Taiwan.
"We call the collaboration a marriage of quality tea and excellent marketing," he said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said that its investment plan in Arizona is going according to schedule, following a local media report claiming that the company is planning to break ground on its third wafer fab in the US in June. In a statement, TSMC said it does not comment on market speculation, but that its investments in Arizona are proceeding well. TSMC is investing more than US$65 billion in Arizona to build three advanced wafer fabs. The first one has started production using the 4-nanometer (nm) process, while the second one would start mass production using the
‘SILVER LINING’: Although the news caused TSMC to fall on the local market, an analyst said that as tariffs are not set to go into effect until April, there is still time for negotiations US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that he would likely impose tariffs on semiconductor, automobile and pharmaceutical imports of about 25 percent, with an announcement coming as soon as April 2 in a move that would represent a dramatic widening of the US leader’s trade war. “I probably will tell you that on April 2, but it’ll be in the neighborhood of 25 percent,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club when asked about his plan for auto tariffs. Asked about similar levies on pharmaceutical drugs and semiconductors, the president said that “it’ll be 25 percent and higher, and it’ll
When an apartment comes up for rent in Germany’s big cities, hundreds of prospective tenants often queue down the street to view it, but the acute shortage of affordable housing is getting scant attention ahead of today’s snap general election. “Housing is one of the main problems for people, but nobody talks about it, nobody takes it seriously,” said Andreas Ibel, president of Build Europe, an association representing housing developers. Migration and the sluggish economy top the list of voters’ concerns, but analysts say housing policy fails to break through as returns on investment take time to register, making the
CHIP BOOM: Revenue for the semiconductor industry is set to reach US$1 trillion by 2032, opening up opportunities for the chip pacakging and testing company, it said ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控), the world’s largest provider of outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) services, yesterday launched a new advanced manufacturing facility in Penang, Malaysia, aiming to meet growing demand for emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The US$300 million facility is a critical step in expanding ASE’s global footprint, offering an alternative for customers from the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea and China to assemble and test chips outside of Taiwan amid efforts to diversify supply chains. The plant, the company’s fifth in Malaysia, is part of a strategic expansion plan that would more than triple
RSS