Although market demand is flat, additional new hotels continue to be constructed. A thousand new hotel rooms have been added in Taipei during 2018 – and many more new hotel projects are in the pipeline both in the capital city and around the island. Unfortunately, they are coming onto the market just as the growth…
Taiwan rose to 13th place in the 2019 Doing Business report. Taiwan moved up two notches from last year to rank No. 13 in the World Bank’s recently released 2019 Doing Business survey. It passed Estonia, Finland, and Australia but came in behind the United Arab Emirates, which soared all the way from last year’s…
Forbes Lists Gou As Taiwan’s Richest In its annual survey of Asia’s wealthiest individuals, Forbes magazine named Terry Gou, founder and chairman of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (also known as Foxconn), as Taiwan’s richest with a fortune worth US$7.3 billion. The Wei brothers of Ting Hsin Inter-national Group were ranked second with combined assets of…
Although Taiwan did not have a team competing in the 2018 World Cup in Russia this June, it was still well represented on the playing fields. The uniforms worn by the athletes from the great majority of the 32 participating countries were made by Taiwanese companies, mainly for such prominent international brands as Nike and…
Thirty-nine state enterprises have been converted into private companies since 1989. The next stage will be the most difficult. Over the past three decades, a total of 39 state-owned enterprises in Taiwan have been transformed into private corporations through the sale of shares in an effort to promote efficiency and reduce the direct involvement of…
Companies are seeking to avoid the low-margin trap by moving into this technically demanding segment of the industry. As the days are gone when fabric could be cut and sewn in Taiwan at competitive costs, its textile sector has been shifting toward technical textiles for which production relies on automation rather than human labor. In…
U.S. Restricts Exports to Chinese IC Company The U.S. Commerce Department announced that American companies will need to apply for licenses for all exports or transfers of commodities, software, and technology to China’s Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co., effective October 30, and that “such license applications will be reviewed with a presumption of denial.” Micron,…
A day in the life of a Taiwan-based Swiss lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 4:30 a.m. Getting enough sleep turns out to be one of the biggest challenges here. Due to the 12-hour time difference, Harvard’s location in Massachusetts is not the most suitable for dealing with Taiwan matters. At first I tried various approaches, for…
TOPICS readers are surely aware of the important role of AmCham Taipei, but may not realize that Taiwan also has two other American chambers. Located in the financial, commercial, and political capital of the country, AmCham Taipei is the oldest, largest, and most influential U.S. business organization in Taiwan. Since its founding in 1951, its…
In recent years, Dan Silver played a central role in the AmCham Taipei leadership. Besides serving as Chairman in 2016, he fulfilled two two-year terms as a member of the Board of Governors (2014-2017) and at different times was a co-chair of two committees, Medical Devices and Public Health. A graduate of Brandeis University in…
