Taipei-based travel start-up KKday has closed its latest US$75 million funding round, helped by a pivot to domestic package tours after the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the global tourism industry this year.
The Series C funding was led by the Taiwanese government’s National Development Fund and the Tokyo-based Cool Japan Fund, while existing investors, including Monk’s Hill Ventures and MindWorks Capital, also participated.
KKday, which previously focused on offering ground package tours at foreign destinations, saw sales plunge 90 percent to hit rock bottom in March, but its shift to domestic tourists has since paid off, founder and CEO Ming Chen (陳明明) said in an interview.
“We were able to secure new funding because investors saw that we acted swiftly and that we were able to execute changes during a crisis,” the 47-year-old Chen said. “Taiwan’s domestic travel began to rebound in May and it exploded in late June. We saw sales from domestic travel in Taiwan grow five times from the same period of last year in July and August.”
With the government mobilizing quickly in the early days of the outbreak, Taiwan has kept COVID-19 cases to less than 600 and only reported seven virus-related deaths among a population of about 24 million.
Some domestic tourist spots have seen visitor numbers surge this year, a contrast with the struggles elsewhere.
A July report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development showed that the US$1.7 trillion global tourism industry is forecasting annual losses of up to 80 percent, while airlines around the world have said that they need as much as US$200 billion in bailouts.
Other markets that KKday operates in — including Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea — have seen a similar rise in domestic travel, Chen said.
Sales at the company, which was founded in 2014 and has more than 5 million users, could return to about the same level as last year toward the end of this year, he added.
Even in the post-COVID-19 world, people will continue to take trips as leisure travel is a “rigid demand,” Chen said.
However, they might choose shorter flights over longer ones, and prefer trips with fewer companions over traditional tour groups that squeeze a large number of people onto buses, he said, which creates opportunities for his business.
KKday is planning premium offerings such as yacht trips for those with high spending power who are stranded at home.
The start-up plans to use the funds raised to expand a platform called Rezio that helps suppliers, particularly those in Southeast Asia, digitize their services, Chen said.
MINIMAL EXPECTATIONS: Analysts think that the two sides are likely to aim for ‘status quo’-level agreements, maintaining civility, without major trade breakthroughs US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) were set to meet yesterday to try to set up potential agreements on artificial intelligence (AI), tariffs and critical minerals for a summit in Washington this week between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). The meetings at JPMorgan Chase & Co’s headquarters in Manhattan, which included US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, were due to start at about 10:30am on Sunday morning and were expected to run all day. Key topics would be the status of a US-China trade truce that is set to expire
APPEAL: Any agreement to produce advanced memory such as HBM or DRAM could run into opposition from Seoul as those technologies are sensitive, sources said South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc is in talks with Intel Corp about a deal that would see it manufacture memory chips on US soil for the first time, three people familiar with the discussions said. Under one potential scenario, SK Hynix would lease part of Intel’s long-planned chipmaking facility in Ohio, they said. Under another scenario, it could form a venture with Intel and major cloud firms that are keen to lock in memory supplies, two of the people said. A deal would relieve pressure on Intel, which has been struggling, and mark a big win for US President Donald
MORE DATA CENTERS: Microsoft’s Taiwan-area general manager said the corporation is looking to add two more data centers in northern Taiwan over the next few years Microsoft Corp plans to double its data centers in Taiwan from two facilities to four, Microsoft Taiwan general manager Sean Pien (卞志祥) said yesterday. “Over the past two to three years, we have consistently seen demand outstrip supply, and we expect that situation to continue over the next two to three years,” Pien said on the sidelines of a news conference in Taipei. The data center sites would mainly be in northern Taiwan to meet customer demand and reduce the risk of operational disruptions caused by a single event, he said, without saying their exact locations. Microsoft enabled the first phase of
Anthropic PBC CEO Dario Amodei and Salesforce Inc CEO Marc Benioff said companies have just begun taking advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and need more help to gain the greatest benefits for their businesses. The power of AI is barely diffused through the economy, with only 5 to 10 percent of the value of the technology being used, Amodei said on Tuesday during an appearance with Benioff at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Implementation of AI at large businesses — like the kind Salesforce mostly serves — remains far away from the futuristic vision professed by executives such as
RSS