Formosa International Hotels Corp (晶華國際酒店集團), the nation’s biggest listed hotel operator, yesterday signed a deal with Hong Kong’s Tomson Group (湯臣集團) to offer personal butler services to a top-end service apartment in Shanghai, marking its official entry into China’s luxury property management business.
Formosa Hotels currently manages Jasper Villa Xinyi (新光信義傑仕堡), a high-end apartment in Taipei that targets business executives, and is expected to clinch a second project with another top-class residential complex, The Palace (帝寶), early next year.
“We will only offer personal butler services to one or two landmark properties in each city, be it in Taiwan or in China,” Formosa Hotels chairman Steven Pan (潘思亮) told reporters after the signing ceremony.
The hotel group set up a subsidiary in Shanghai to serve top-end clients residing at Tomson Riviera (湯臣一品), one of the most expensive luxury apartments in China.
Tomson Riviera sold a unit of 180 ping (594m²) early this month for 96 million yuan (US$14 million), which translates to about NT$2.5 million (US$77,500) per ping.
Under the pact, Formosa Hotels would send experts to train personnel in Shanghai to offer personal butler services to Tomson Riviera’s residents, with the services ranging from food catering to business trip arrangements to language interpretation.
The deal with Tomson marks a further step for Formosa Hotels’ expansion across the Strait.
“Chairman Pan has been surveying the market in Beijing,” said Ellen Chang (張筠), Formosa Hotels’ public relations director.
With hotels in oversupply in Beijing after the Olympics Games, Formosa Hotels said it had no intention of buying lands or purchasing hotels but would rather use its experience in managing hotels, luxury apartments and luxury goods to work with real estate developers there, Chang said.
Its subsidiary, Grand Formosa Regent Taipei (晶華酒店), would manage its own luxury shops at the Regent Galleria (麗晶精品), when the operator’s lease ends in July.
A mall located at the hotel’s basement, Regent Galleria, brings in revenues of more than NT$2 billion a year.
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
TALENT FACTOR: The nation’s chip sector would be difficult to replace, but to maintain that advantage, Taiwan must retain skilled workers, an academic said A group of experts on Sunday called on Taiwan to strive to maintain its world-leading position in the semiconductor industry, with a US-China chip dispute expected to continue regardless of who becomes the next US president. Tamkang University Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies director Li Da-jung (李大中) said at a Taipei seminar on global semiconductor security that the relationship between the two superpowers would remain confrontational. There appears to be “no turning back” in US-China relations, as US presidential candidates US Vice President Kamala Harris and former US president Donald Trump are both expected to continue Washington’s hawkish stance
RSS