Like many local and foreign companies, DHL cannot resist the temptation of the lucrative Chinese market, but unlike some that are rushing to switch their investment across the Strait, the multinational logistics giant is confident in Taiwan's prospects and is pumping more cash into the nation.
"Taiwan is still an extremely important market to us," DHL Express chief executive officer Wue Doerken told reporters in Taipei yesterday.
"I'm glad to see the result ? as the market gets bigger, we are now able to take advantage of our previous investment," he said.
Doerken is in town to inspect results of the US$30 million "Taiwan Anchor Investment Program" DHL announced in early 2000. Under the program, DHL planned to establish five large-scale service centers in Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung to increase service efficiency.
In addition, the company began to operate its Hsinchu center at the end of last month, and will open another one in Taoyuan in the first quarter of next year.
Currently, DHL Taiwan Corp has about 2,200 staff and dominates the market with a 40 percent share. It entered Taiwan in 1973. John Mullen, DHL Asia Pacific chief executive officer, refused to reveal sales figure for Taiwan, but said revenue for the Asia-Pacific region totals about 2.5 billion euros, and Taiwan's share of this has grown 15 percent this year.
DHL sales in China, however, enjoyed a 40 percent increase this year. To meet the surging demand in the region, DHL plans to add 1,000 more employees on top of the current 3,900 in express service handling within 12 months, Mullen said.
"China will become our largest market in Asia within two years, due to the continuing relocation of production from Southeast Asia countries to the mainland," Doerken said.
The expansion in China will instead benefit DHL's business in Taiwan, as 35 percent of Chinese exports are generated by Taiwan-invested companies, and those semi-finished goods may be transported back to Taiwan to process into higher added-value products, Doerken said, citing a statistics from the Taiwan Electrical & Electronics Manufacturers Association (TEEMA, 電電公會).
As to the liberalization of direct cross-strait traffic, an issue constantly addressed by local and foreign companies, this will not cause significant changes to the company's operations except for cost savings.
"Even without direct links, we can conduct overnight delivery between the two sides via Hong Kong," Mullen said.
Brussels-based DHL is a unit of German postal service Deutsche Post, Europe's largest mail company.
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