Three companies and their brands have a chance to crack the Taiwan Top 20 Global Brand list for the first time this year with their high brand value and promising business outlook, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) said yesterday.
The three firms and their brand names are MSI (微星), a manufacturer of consumer electronics and industrial computers; Leadtek (麗臺), which focuses on research, design and development of graphics cards; and Biostar (映泰), a motherboard and graphics card manufacturer supporting Intel and AMD processors, a TAITRA statement said.
These three firms are among 21 companies that have been selected in leading global brand consultancy Interbrand’s Taiwan Top 20 Global Brands survey and will be cited by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) at a ceremony next Tuesday, the statement said.
Of the three new firms, one will be honored as an “emerging brand” rather than as a new entry on the top 20 list, the statement said.
Other brand names making the list this year are, in alphabetical order, Acer (宏碁), Advantech (研華), Asus (華碩), D-Link (友訊), Depo (帝寶), Genius (昆盈), Giant (巨大), HTC (宏達電), Johnson (喬山), Master Kong (康師傅), Maxxis (正新), Merida (美利達), Synnex (聯強), Transcend (創見), Trend Micro (趨勢), Uni-President (統一) and Zyxel (合勤).
Also on the top 20 list this year is last year’s emerging brand, Danze faucets and bathroom accessories by Globe Union Industrial Corp (成霖).
TAITRA figures showed the nation’s top 20 brands were worth US$9.14 billion as of June 30, exceeding the US$9 billion mark for the first time.
The top 10 brands had an estimated value of US$7.54 billion.
“These values indicate that in a declining global economic environment, these Taiwanese companies that have been building their brands have been able to establish their images in competitive markets, have attracted consumer support and resisted downward economic pressures,” TAITRA said.
Meanwhile, BenQ (明基), which ranked sixth in an Interbrand survey of the top 10 Taiwanese brands last year, did not make the top 20 list this year as a result of corporate restructuring over the past year.
In ranking the value of Taiwan’s top 20 brands, Interbrand evaluated brand value in the same way any other corporate asset is valued — on the basis of how much it is likely to earn for the company in the future.
Interbrand uses a combination of analysts’ projections, company financial documents and its own qualitative and quantitative analyses to arrive at a net value of those earnings. This year’s brand values are based on data collected during the 12 months prior to June 30.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
AI: Softbank’s stake increases in Nvidia and TSMC reflect Masayoshi Son’s effort to gain a foothold in key nodes of the AI value chain, from chip design to data infrastructure Softbank Group Corp is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the latest reflection of founder Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about US$3 billion by the end of March, up from US$1 billion in the prior quarter, regulatory filings showed. It bought about US$330 million worth of TSMC shares and US$170 million in Oracle Corp, they showed. Softbank’s signature Vision Fund has also monetized almost US$2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of this year,
RSS