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…
With their heavy exposure to China, Taiwanese tech firms are feeling the bite of the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. For years, China bears warned Taiwanese tech firms about their dependence on the Chinese market. A deep recession in China or a cross-Strait relations crisis could spell trouble for companies overly reliant on Chinese manufacturing…
Taiwan needs to be prepared to face a challenging year in 2019. That’s one of several key messages from AmCham Taipei’s recently released Business Climate Survey. Notably fewer of our member executives – about 45% compared to 55% a year ago — expressed confidence in the economic outlook for the coming 12 months. Significantly, however,…
Tariff Rate Set for Offshore Wind Energy The Ministry of Economic Affairs in late January announced a new feed-in tariff for offshore wind power – a 5.71% reduction from the previous level but a smaller cut than the 12.71% previously proposed. The Ministry had been feeling pressure from two sides. Critics argued that the government…
I used to wait until breakfast before reading the news. Now it’s the first thing I do after shutting off my alarm. Before getting out of bed, I reach for my iPhone and start scanning the headlines of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times for positive news that might have broken…
Feeling the Pinch With the global trade environment growing increasingly uncertain, Taiwan recorded exports worth US$28.6 billion in December, 3% less than in the same month a year earlier. The Ministry of Finance attributed the dip largely to sluggish demand for semiconductors used in manufacturing smartphones. New export orders received in December told a similar…
The majority of Taiwan’s 23.7 million people live in busy cities like Greater Taipei and Kaohsiung. Of the many more rural areas that make up the rest of the island, one of the most bucolic is Yunlin County in the central-western lowlands. The Yunlin County government is located in Douliu City, and the county’s High-Speed…
