The government is downplaying the attendence factor for President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) investor conference this autumn, saying the sending of lower level representatives will be alright.
Chen came up with the idea of a "2003 Taiwan Business Alliance Conference" last November as a way of increasing technical cooperation and investment. The government has invited the chief executive officers of at least 600 multinational corporations, as well as local business heavyweights.
To date, the bosses of DuPont, Applied Materials, Sony Inc, Intel Corp, Siemens AG and Philips Electronics N.V. have turned down the conference invitation, according to Connie Chang, a conference official at Ministry of Economic Affairs' Industrial Development & Investment Center, the organizer of the conference.
Chang said the government would lower its expectations, but she was quick to stress scheduling was the problem.
"We can accept officials of other ranks," Chang said."The CEOs of foreign companies that cannot make it to the meeting declined due to scheduling problems."
In addition, some invitations may have gone out as late as last week due to delays caused by the SARS epidemic, which could account from some people being unable to make the meeting, she said.
However, Intel's Asia Pacific office in Taipei and Siemens Limited Taiwan said yesterday that they were unaware of the meeting.
Philips' Taiwan said its CEO was already occupied with other commitments while Sony said last month that it was willing to send another official instead of CEO Nobuyuki Idei to the conference.
A market watcher, however, said there may be other factors causing CEOs to drop out.
"I'm not surprised if foreign investors are nonchalant about the conference," said Cheng Cheng-mount (
"I don't think foreign investment will significantly rise by holding an investment conference," he said.
Foreign firms remain concerned about the domestic investment environment and the government's haphazard economic policymaking can hardly woo as much investment as expected, Cheng said.
The government had hoped to secure up to NT$724.5 billion in new investments as a result of the conference, Chinese-language me-dia reported recently.
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