Yong Kang 15 (永康15), the new mango shaved ice shop set up on site of the famed Ice Monster (冰館) on Yong Kang Street, has achieved its revenue target of NT$100,000 (US$3,000) per day less than a week after its official opening on Monday.
The Taipei-based FnB Gourmet Group, the owner of Yong Kang 15, yesterday opened its central kitchen for the shaved ice shop to the media for the first time and said it was not worried that its seemingly overpriced desserts would scare away customers.
“We believe in the principle of market supply and demand. If our products are really too expensive, we would naturally be phased out,” FnB Gourmet marketing director David Hsu (許立) said.
PHOTO: LIN CHENG-KUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
Trying to differentiate Yong Kang 15 from its predecessor, Hsu said that the company had put a lot of effort into developing new recipes for its various shaved ice items to attract more dessert lovers from home and abroad. Ice Monster, which closed down about half a year ago over an ownership dispute, was well-known for its mango shaved ice desserts for 15 years and was included in the New York Times list of 13 things to do in Taipei if you have 36 hours.
While praising the ice shop for its fresh fruit, some customers said the mango serving seemed to be smaller and they couldn’t feel much of a difference in taste and flavor compared with the previous shop.
“The fruit is very fresh and they use mango dressing instead of sugar water, which I find pretty tasty. But I feel like the mango serving, in particular, has become smaller,” a customer named Tina Chou (周經婷) said.
Asked whether it was worth the NT$160 price tag, Chou said it was a bit pricey and that NT$120 would be more reasonable.
The reopening of the shop has also brought back more business to the neighborhood. A taro shaved ice shop next to Yong Kang 15 said it saw more customers come back these days.
“Our shop is less popular with foreign tourists, but we have indeed benefited from [Yong Kang 15’s] reopening and many of our old customers have also come back,” taro ice shop owner Li Yen-han (李彥漢) said.
FnB Gourmet said it was in talks with the National Palace Museum to open a store or kiosk at the museum to promote Taiwanese traditional shaved ice desserts to foreign tourists.
“By the end of this year, we hope to offer online ordering and home-delivery services to meet greater market demand and expand our retail businesses to hotels or department stores,” Hsu said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to