Taiwan Today

In a June 3 New York Times headline article titled “Taiwan Tech Firms Strive to Be Global, ” the author wrote of how the island’s technology companies are no longer satisfied with contract manufacturing. Instead, they seek to become world players, establish their own brands and maximize profits. To date, the results have been impressive. For over a decade, Taiwan’s manufacturers and Western technology companies enjoyed a straightforward, mutually beneficial relationship. The island’s companies produced mobile phones, laptops and music players in line with the specifications of such clients as Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola. These high-tech firms then branded the items, hiked the prices and showed off their amazing new products in large-scale advertising campaigns. In recent years, Taiwan’s enterprises are no longer content with working behind the scenes. Now, they are focusing directly on consumers and promoting their own brands. Some of them are already leading technology firms. The Eee PC invented by Asus was actually the original netbook that has now taken the world by storm, Acer is set to surpass Dell to become the second-biggest producer of PCs after Hewlett-Packard, and HTC was the first developer of smartphones that run on Google’s Android operating system. Together, these companies highlight how Taiwan’s high-tech enterprises have become the focus of global attention. Taiwan’s firms that have traditionally focused on manufacturing hardware are increasingly investing in software companies in Silicon Valley, such as software company DeviceVM. This enables them to be better positioned to take advantage of new technological developments. Foxconn Technology Group is another example of a company that is branching out. It has recently employed thousands of software developers and revamped its services arm. In the words of Taiwan-born Mark Lee, founder of DeviceVM, “There is a strong desire in Taiwan’s tech industry to try and break through. I think it is going through that big transformation right now.”