The designer furniture retailer opens its first ‘bricks and mortar’ store in the busy Chinatown district today
2 minLovers of interior design now have a new destination with Australian designer furniture retailer Cult opening its first store in Singapore today.
The store at 48 Club Street, Singapore represents Cult’s first foray into a ‘bricks and mortar’ retail environment in Asia, following on from six years of B2B activity in Asia.
Founded in Sydney by Richard Munao in 1997 as Corporate Culture, the Singapore Cult store located in the heart of the busy Chinatown district will stock familiar Australian brands such as Nau, Tait and Coco Flip, as well as Danish design houses including HAY, Gubi, Vipp and &Tradition.
Cult has been active in Singapore since 2017, with the team completing projects across Asia in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Thailand, among others.
Much like the evolution from a trade-only business in Australia to a popular retail environment with stores in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, Mr Munao said the opening of the store in Chinatown is in response to repeated demand from clients to be able to experience and access the products for themselves.
“Our first six years in Singapore were dedicated to relationship building with key clients and increasing the Cult brand awareness within the regional design community,” he said.
“During the pandemic the rising demand for well-designed furniture for the home also led to a sharp increase in retail enquiries, sales and repeated requests from retail clients for us to have a physical store to visit.”
Business development manager for Cult Singapore, Ravi Shankar, said now was the right time to launch the business to the wider public with an eye for design.
“Affluent Singaporeans are willing to spend more to furnish their homes and businesses now than 10 years ago, when only the wealthiest individuals and corporations would consider ‘designer’ furniture,” he said. “Singapore also remains a gateway to South East Asia, with some of the best design work for the region being undertaken by firms in Singapore.
“This is likely to continue with the steady influx of talent and organisations from areas such as Hong Kong and Shanghai.”
BNW Developments has established a Sydney presence, joining Arada and Sobha Realty among the growing number of UAE developers pursuing Australian buyers and development opportunities.
The Australian leather house has opened an immersive four-day pop-up in Manhattan, unveiling its Bloom Collection and redefining what a product launch can look like.
Apple’s growth engine is showing signs of slowing, as rising costs, weaker services growth and AI competition challenge its profitability. With John Ternus taking the helm, the pressure is on to reignite innovation and sustain investor confidence.
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The Apple growth and profit machine is wavering, and the boost from price increases might not be enough to keep it going at historic rates. That dials up the pressure on Apple’s new chief executive, John Ternus.
The company saved the bad news for its earnings call, an hour after it posted its results for the September quarter, projecting that for the current quarter its high-margin services business will continue to slow and that its widely watched gross profit margin will continue to fall.
Apple AAPL -1.83%decrease; down pointing triangle shares had been flat in post-close trading but declined as much as 4% after the company made the projections, which fell short of Wall Street estimates.
The impact of high memory costs are weighing even more heavily on the company, Ternus and Apple Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh said on the company’s earnings call. Apple has stockpiled cheaper components purchased earlier, but those inventories are dwindling.
When Ternus took over as Apple’s third chief executive of the past 29 years on Sept. 1, he inherited sky-high expectations. The men he followed were among the most successful company leaders in American business history. Steve Jobs revolutionized consumer devices multiple times. Tim Cook expanded Jobs’s creation to spectacular heights.
The expectations are reflected in Apple’s huge valuation. Oppenheimer analyst Martin Yang noted that Apple stock trades at 36 times next year’s expected earnings, a premium to the overall market, even though its earnings are only expected to grow 1%, which is slower than its tech peers.
“We see insufficient upside to justify the premium,” Yang wrote in an investor note, adding that Apple needs to boost iPhone sales growth and turn around its slowing services business to make him more bullish.
Investors have bid up Apple shares because it has been a port in the AI storm—a reliable and capital-efficient business that stands apart from rivals which are spending hundreds of billions of dollars racing to the AI frontier.
While others invest in data centers, Apple has been pouring its own cash into buybacks and dividends. But that safety may be challenged if Ternus can’t speed up Apple’s innovation engine.
Apple’s lagging performance in AI was evident when its new “Siri AI” chatbot arrived this past quarter. Its long-maligned assistant was already stale the day it arrived, surpassed by agents such as Instinct and Muse that can complete multistep tasks for consumers, while Siri still sets kitchen timers.
Apple needs to give people reasons to buy its devices as they get more expensive. The company raised prices across the board last quarter to help offset higher costs. Without compelling new features, a big question is whether consumers will slow the frequency of iPhone upgrades.
The new iPhone Duo appears to be a bright spot. Consumers are scooping up the $1,999 foldable smartphone despite mixed reviews—so many that Apple can’t keep up with demand. Shipping dates jumped out to January soon after the device went on sale, a disappointment for the normally reliable Apple supply chain.
Apple said its revenue grew 12% in the September quarter, slightly ahead of Wall Street’s expectations. Its widely tracked gross profit margin, at 47.9%, also came in just ahead of analyst estimates.
Apple will need to find new growth avenues because a reliable engine during the Cook era—the services business—is slowing. Courts and regulators worldwide have limited Apple’s ability to charge developers big fees to distribute apps through its App Store, the biggest component of the company’s services segment.
One of its most lucrative App Store fee generators has been the ChatGPT app from OpenAI. Around the time Apple accused OpenAI of trade-secret theft this past summer, OpenAI began redirecting potential subscribers to pay via its website instead of the App Store, skirting Apple’s tollbooth.
Apple’s valuation has bumped up against a ceiling in recent weeks. Six times it traded above a $5 trillion market capitalization intraday before finally closing above the threshold, which it has already fallen back below.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services.
