A New Milestone for Industry-Academia Collaboration! Eastern Group and Fu Jen Catholic University (FJCU) signed an industry-academia cooperation agreement yesterday (30th). The signing ceremony was attended by FJCU President Vincent Chiang and Eastern Group President Gary Wang. The group is now the first top-level VIP member of FJCU’s Global Research & Industry Alliance (GLORIA) Platform under the Global Research and Industry Alliance Project launched by the Ministry of Science and Technology. Representatives from other GLORIA members, including National Tsing Hua University, National Chengchi University, and Tamkang University, were also invited to celebrate this occasion and support the formation of stronger industry-academia relationships. It is hoped that this collaboration will further expand the market and become a main driver of Taiwan’s development.

Gary Wang first said that returning to FJCU felt like coming back home. In 2003, he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree in business management from FJCU. His sister, Lin-Mei Wang, cousin, Pu-Chih Wang, Eastern New Retail Department President, Shi-Heng Zhao, ETtoday General Manager, Mel Chen, ETMall CEO, Eric Yang, among many Eastern Group supervisors are all FJCU alumni. This agreement will further strengthen the friendship between Eastern and FJCU.

To increase the product development capabilities of Eastern Group’s e-commerce businesses, FJCU and Eastern Group have jointly established the FJCU-Eastern Wellness and Fitness Center. The Center will develop supplements and cosmetics, and will set up a healthcare center to promote good health through wellness and fitness. Furthermore, the FJCU-Eastern Smart Data Center was also established to help the company conduct polls and surveys through cloud data to accurately meet the needs of customers.

Mr. Wang was particularly thankful to FJCU Vice President Ben-Chang Shia for facilitating the collaboration. Mr. Wang stated that when retail businesses in Taiwan started to develop customer relationship management (CRM) systems ten years ago, Vice President Shia assisted Eastern with setting up a Big Data system to analyze their target customer base. The system helped Eastern New Retail achieve a higher operational efficiency than many other industries in the country. In fact, Eastern is the only company in Taiwan that has achieved a net profit margin of over 6.5% in the domestic retail industry. Eastern has also adopted AI technology on top of its existing Big Data system by signing a technical cooperation agreement with ASUS. Furthermore, ETtoday has a daily traffic of 18 million visitors and 6 million different active users, while ETMall has an annual customer base of 2 million customers. Without a doubt, Big Data can further help the company achieve better operational efficiency.

Gary Wang stressed that Eastern is committed to providing products and services that satisfy customers’ demands for tastiness, beauty, and well-being. Eastern is grateful for the opportunity to work with such a prestigious institution. FJCU is a leader in food and nutrition science and its Artificial Intelligence Center has a first-class Big Data team. Mr. Wang also believes that enterprises need to draw from science and knowledge in academia to grow and remain competitive. He is convinced that the collaboration will prove beneficial to the development of the group. At the same time, FJCU can provide more scientific evidence to the benefits of EHS Select products, enabling consumers to buy with confidence and peace of mind.

As for President Vincent Chiang, he was also happy to have been offered the opportunity to enter such a productive relationship with Eastern. He pointed out that this type of industry-academia collaboration is a good start to further promote the commercialization of research results and may pave the way for more innovation that satisfies consumer demands for health and well-being using nutritional science. In addition, by incorporating Big Data and the ETtoday Survey, we can obtain insights into market changes to find out customer demands and create co-prosperity.