CEOs fret over recruiting, links

When Inventec Group (英業達集團) chief executive officer Richard Lee (李詩欽) met some 500 young engineers during an internal meeting recently, he told the newly recruited workers that they are going to serve as "high-tech acrobats" across the Taiwan Strait.

"Working at Taipei's offices and running errands to Shanghai is a slice of an Inventec engineers' life ... the global market is our battleground," said the head of the nation's leading cellphone maker, of the OKWAP brand handsets.

Like most local IT manufacturers that have relocated production lines to China, Inventec has found that issues relating to talent recruitment and the cross-strait travel of engineers need to be solved as soon as possible, Lee said earlier this month during a forum.

The government appeared satisfied with its efforts in courting foreign investment following an international business conference last week, but offered no solution to the problems of a potential talent shortage and the cost of continually shuttling personnel across the Taiwan Strait.

During the conference, the government successfully solicited 15 multinational conglomerates to set up research and development centers in Taiwan.

Hiring Chinese workers and cross-strait direct-transportation of goods and people are still restricted by official policy.

Current regulations limit private companies from hiring more than 20 percent of their research and development personnel from China.

"Our strategy is to reverse the previous business model of purely making products for international companies," said Hwang Jong-chiou (黃重球), director general of the Department of Industrial Technology, under the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

"Instead, we want to work hand-in-hand with global vendors' design teams, because we have been losing our manufacturing advantage to China," Hwang said.

Though the government's ban on direct transportation is not considered a determining factor for companies such as Broadcom Corp and Texas Instruments Inc to increase their investment in Taiwan, such a policy "has been a headache for a lot of people," Broadcom executive Shih Cheng-chung (施振強) said at a semiconductor workshop during the Taiwan Business Alliance Conference last week.

"Generally speaking, it [direct transportation] did cause some trouble and inconvenience, as most multinational companies are under a lot of cost pressure, but it's not a big problem," Terry Cheng (程天縱), president of TI Asia, eching Shih's comment during the same conference.

Revisiting the problem of the cross-strait travel, Chen Wen-chi (陳文琦), president of chipmaker VIA Technologies Inc (威盛電子), said in a separate forum that the problem is still manageable by sending engineers to the customers' Chinese branches to discuss the design of new chips.

"The issue, however, is becoming more prominent" as more manufacturing is expected to move to China, Chen warned.

"How to attract overseas talent to work in Taiwan is crucial for Taiwan's integrated circuit [IC] industry to maintain competitiveness as the growth of local talent is lagging behind the industry's demand," Chen added.

The fight for the nation's best would-be engineers starts even before graduation arrives. A number of well-known local companies, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) and Hon Hai Precision Industrial Co (鴻海精密), send high-ranking executives to the nation's university campuses in an effort to recruit new blood.