PARIS, June 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- MINISO, the global lifestyle brand known for its fun, affordable, design-led products, celebrated the grand opening of its brand-new flagship store in Paris on Saturday, June 22nd. The prime location, situated at 104 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, places MINISO right in the heart of the city's most iconic shopping district, nestled among the world's most famous luxury brands and just steps away from the Arc de Triomphe. The grand opening created a buzz in the city, and the store even achieved a new MINISO record for single-day sales outside of mainland China.
The Paris flagship, which is MINISO's largest store in Europe, marks a significant milestone for MINISO's ongoing global expansion, aligning perfectly with the brand's ambitious "Super Store" strategy. This strategic approach focuses on establishing large-format stores in key, high-traffic areas. These "Super Stores" offer customers a truly immersive MINISO experience, showcasing the brand's extensive product range across categories like household goods, cosmetics, stationery, and more. The new flagship, which sprawls across two floors and over 8,600ft2, particularly highlights MINISO's IP collaboration collections - one of the brand's key strategic product categories - with design elements and store zones dedicated to Sanrio, Disney, Barbie and others. The store will also be the first in France to debut the new BT21 IP collection.
The new opening comes on the back of strong financial performance for the brand in the March quarter of 2024. The brand's total global revenue grew 26% YoY to US$515.7 million, while revenue generated from overseas markets surged by 52.6% YoY to US$169.2 million. This impressive performance reflects the relevance and resilience of the brand's business model and the universal appeal of its products.
"The new flagship store in Paris is another exciting step forward for MINISO," said Vincent Huang, general manager of MINISO overseas distributor markets and vice president. "Following the successful launch of Super Stores in Times Square and Oxford Street, this prestigious Parisian location further solidifies our commitment to the 'Super Store' strategy and its role in elevating the customer experience and propelling our global brand recognition."
MINISO's "Super Store" strategy goes beyond simply offering a wider product selection. These larger stores create a more engaging and interactive shopping environment, fostering a sense of discovery and excitement for customers. This emphasis on experience, combined with the brand's dedication to high-quality products at affordable prices, is a key driver of MINISO's success in international markets.
With the addition of the Paris flagship, MINISO now boasts a presence in 110 overseas (outside mainland China) markets, with 6,630 stores worldwide. The brand's long-term vision is to become a global super brand, and it plans to achieve this by establishing 900 - 1,100 new stores globally in 2024, with over 50% of the new stores to be located overseas. This strategic expansion will solidify MINISO's position as a leading lifestyle destination for consumers around the world.
About MINISO
MINISO Group is a global lifestyle brand offering a variety of trendy lifestyle products featuring IP design. The Company serves consumers primarily through its large network of MINISO stores and promotes a relaxing, treasure-hunting, and engaging shopping experience full of delightful surprises that appeal to all demographics. Aesthetically pleasing design, quality, and affordability are at the core of every product in MINISO's wide product portfolio, and the Company continually and frequently rolls out products with these qualities. Since the opening of its first store in China in 2013, the Company has built its flagship brand "MINISO" as a globally recognized retail brand and established a massive store network worldwide.
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
MINISO Opens New Paris Flagship on Champs-Elysées, Breaking Sales Record and Marking Major Step in Global Expansion Strategy
MINISO Opens New Paris Flagship on Champs-Elysées, Breaking Sales Record and Marking Major Step in Global Expansion Strategy
MINISO Opens New Paris Flagship on Champs-Elysées, Breaking Sales Record and Marking Major Step in Global Expansion Strategy
SEOUL, South Korea and REDMOND, Wash., Sept. 29, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- KT Corporation and Microsoft today unveiled a five-year multibillion-dollar partnership, which includes an investment from KT in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud technologies, and IT business, and a resource commitment from Microsoft in the areas of infrastructure and people. Through this partnership, the companies will propel KT's AI and ICT (AICT) transformation, and accelerate the advancement of AI services and innovation in Korea.
Following the agreement in June, KT and Microsoft have engaged in ongoing discussions to strengthen ties and outline key areas of collaboration and support. This strategic partnership is expected to drive progress in five pivotal areas: Development of customized AI solutions for Korea, delivering Korean sovereign cloud solutions, the establishment of an AI transformation (AX)-specialized service company, AI R&D capabilities advancement across Korea and KT's AICT transformation.
Developing Customized AI Solutions for Korea
KT and Microsoft will engage in engineering collaboration to develop a customized version of GPT-4o and explore developing a customized version of Microsoft's Phi family of small language models, with KT's extensive set of high-quality data around Korean culture and industries. These models will be used for both KT's internal and consumer-facing applications such as customer service chatbots, and also for building industry-specific AI solutions for B2B customers across industry verticals to best serve the needs of Korean consumers and businesses. KT will leverage Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure AI Studio to develop custom AI agents aimed at differentiating customer experiences. KT plans to expand the development and utilization of KT-custom AI agents not only for consumer use cases in education, healthcare, and in-vehicle infotainment, but also for business applications. Importantly, Microsoft and KT will collaborate closely on further evolving KT's Responsible AI framework to help ensure the delivery of safe AI services for the Korea market.
"We are delighted with the partnership between KT and Microsoft, which presents a valuable opportunity to enhance our digital competitiveness," said Shinhan Bank, a leading financial group in Korea. "By utilizing the KT GPT model, specialized in Korean language and financial services, we aim to deliver innovative AI-driven services to the domestic financial consumers."
Delivering Korean sovereign cloud solutions
KT and Microsoft are partnering to develop and launch Secure Public Cloud services, which is KT's sovereign cloud solution built on Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty for Korean-regulated industries. KT will drive its Secure Public Cloud business with support from Microsoft, enabling public sector and regulated industry customers to use new platform capabilities for securing data and workloads, providing access to the latest cloud and AI features available on Azure and helping them comply with local privacy and regulatory requirements.
Accelerating AI transformation through AX-Specialized service company
KT will establish a new AX-specialized service company to help businesses in Korea transform with the latest AI innovation. The forthcoming KT's AX-specialized service company will provide advanced Microsoft Cloud and AI expertise and solutions to the Korean market, with plans to expand to broader markets, including ASEAN. Microsoft will support this initiative over the next three years with professional consulting resources to build core practices and capabilities for the new entity.
Advancing AI R&D capabilities across Korea
Microsoft will support KT in establishing a co-innovation center aimed at accelerating Microsoft technology-driven AI transformation in the Korean market. This center will help businesses build, develop and prototype new AI solutions with Microsoft technology and KT's AI specialists. Furthermore, KT will invest in fostering new AI startups and developing a partner ecosystem to support nationwide AI transformation. Microsoft will support this initiative by providing Azure credits and technical expertise. For the future of technology collaboration, KT and Microsoft Research (MSR)'s research leaders and business visionaries will explore high-impact research initiatives in network modernization, AI for healthcare, and industry AI adoption and further collaborate with leading academic institutions partnering with KT.
Accelerating KT's AICT Transformation with organization-wide upskilling
KT will migrate and modernize existing IT workloads including mission-critical applications, to Microsoft Azure while developing a new data platform and AI services powered by Microsoft Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service. This collaboration will enhance KT's overall IT infrastructure, making it more agile, resilient, and secure, driving innovation and elevating the customer experience through intelligent automation. KT also intends to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot, for all KT employees and developers to supercharge productivity of the entire business. Microsoft will assist KT in equipping more than 19,000 employees with cloud and AI skills and enabling more than 5,800 AX specialists to lead a successful transformation through KT group-wide skilling and co-engineering support.
"The partnership with Microsoft presents a pivotal opportunity, not only for technological collaboration but also for expanding Korea's AI foundation and driving transformative innovation across industries and daily life," said KT CEO Young-Shub Kim. "Leveraging this strategic partnership, we aim to rapidly evolve into an AICT company with unparalleled competitiveness in domestic and global markets." 
"Our strategic partnership brings together KT's industry expertise with the power of our entire tech stack, from Azure AI to Microsoft 365 Copilot," said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft. "Together, we will help accelerate the AI transformation of Korean organizations across the private and public sector and build new AI-powered experiences for millions of consumers."
About KT Corporation
KT Corporation is a leading company in Korea's telecommunications and ICT industries. By building an AX innovation platform based on differentiated AI, Big Data and Cloud competitiveness, and offering it with outstanding network infrastructure, KT is driving evolution into an AICT (AI and ICT) company.
About Microsoft 
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) creates platforms and tools powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. The technology company is committed to making AI available broadly and doing so responsibly, with a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rapidresponse@we-worldwide.com
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
KT Corporation and Microsoft Take 'Giant Step' to Accelerate AI Innovation in Korea
