Forty years ago, AmCham Taipei members found themselves in the middle of a giant geopolitical shift – the new diplomatic alliance between Washington and Beijing. The ramifications for Taiwan were significant, creating serious challenges that are described well in this issue of TOPICS. The heroic way AmCham members stepped up to meet the challenges is…
After a decade of discussion and planning, construction began last October on an MRT system for the northern Taiwan city of Taoyuan, starting with a 27.8-kilometer Green Line. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan hailed the event as reflecting the city’s “coming of age.” The first portion of the Green Line will be…
Taiwan’s three Science-based Industrial Parks – the Hsinchu Science Park in northern Taiwan, Central Taiwan Science Park centered in Taichung, and Southern Taiwan Science Park centered in Tainan – have provided a nurturing base of operations for the country’s high-tech industries. The advantages of locating within a science park include: One-stop Service. Companies need to…
Taiwan’s producers must move up the value chain as Chinese competitors undercut them on price in the mass market. The optoelectronics sector, a fixture in Taiwan’s science parks, has faced intensifying competition from China in recent years. Like the Taiwanese before them, the Chinese have focused on making products of acceptable quality at a low…
The Taoyuan Airport is already crowded well beyond the designed capacity. If the crowded conditions at Taipei Taoyuan Airport annoy you, get used to it. The situation will likely only get worse between now and late 2023 when the airport’s third terminal is supposed to be ready for service. Repeated delays have plagued the project….
Since the first park opened in Hsinchu in 1980, the emphasis has been on accommodating manufacturers of technology hardware products. That focus is expected to start changing, as Taiwan’s industrial upgrading puts more stress on software, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Over the decades, much of Taiwan’s success as a global manufacturing…
I recently attended a dinner party with former AmCham Taipei members who were visiting Taiwan after moving away years ago. They reminisced about how much they loved living here and how much they miss the island. It was obvious that their time spent here ranked high among the happiest periods of their lives – professionally…
AmCham Taipei’s Private Equity Committee suspended operations in late 2017 in frustration over the difficulty PE firms were facing in Taiwan in gaining approval for investment applications. In a number of cases over the previous six years, investment plans by PE companies had been either rejected outright or stalled so long that the prospective investor…
Part of President Tsai Ing-wen’s vision for the New Southbound Policy was for Taiwan to host an annual conference of thought leaders from the target countries to provide guidance regarding regional concerns and how the New Southbound Policy could best address them. Organizing the event – to be held each year on October 11 and…
Another Chapter in NTU Presidency Saga It appeared in December that the prolonged standoff between National Taiwan University and the Ministry of Education over the NTU faculty’s election of economist Kuan Chung-ming as university president had finally been resolved. Education Minister Yeh Jiunn-rong, who was moved over from the Interior Ministry specifically to bring the…
