The future of business in Taiwan lies in branding, no matter how difficult it is to achieve, Acer Inc (宏碁) founder Stan Shih (施振榮) said at a business seminar in Taipei on Saturday.
“The days of doing OEM [original equipment manufacturing] and ODM [original design manufacturing] are numbered,” Shih said. “Perhaps these businesses will thrive for another five to 10 years, I don’t know. But going forward, in order to elevate Taiwan to the global business scene with added value, we have to invest in branding right now. This is our social responsibility.”
Acer, the world’s third-largest maker of personal computers, ranked No. 3 in an Interbrand survey of top 20 Taiwanese brands this year, with a brand value of NT$39.84 billion (US$1.265 billion).
The survey, released on Tuesday, placed Trend Micro (趨勢) as the top Taiwanese brand with NT$41.77 billion in brand value, followed by Asus (華碩) with NT$41.68 billion.
But going from ODM and OEM into branding is incredibly difficult, Shih said. He shared with the audience the difficulties in conveying to Acer employees the decision to focus on brands and that to spin off Wistron Corp (緯創) to achieve this goal.
“Once your corporate culture as an OEM is established, it’s hard to change it into an innovative brand-building company,” Shih said.
Acer took years to cultivate its brand as well as its manufacturing arms independently so they could both stand on their own.
It was a shock to Wistron when it learned Acer signed a manufacturing contract with one of Wistron’s competitors.
“This is when Wistron realized that Acer is no longer its guaranteed support and when the rest of the industry realized that Acer is playing for real,” Shih said.
High Tech Computer Corp (HTC, 宏達電) president Peter Chou (周永明) was the other guest of honor at the seminar on Saturday. Echoing Shih’s stance on the future of Taiwan, he said: “Manufacturing is no longer a value Taiwan businesses can provide. Vietnam, China and other emerging countries are quickly catching up.”
So far, the number of international brands created by Taiwan is few and far between.
HTC, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones running Microsoft Corp’s smart phone software platform, ranked No. 4 in the Interbrand survey, with a brand value of NT$37.86 billion. The company launched its first Android-based Google phone, or the G1, in the US on Sept. 23.
As global markets give their brands a bigger playing field, both Shih and Chou said Acer had this in mind when it chose to build its hub in Europe and markets from Europe to North America, then to Asia, which also explains why HTC handsets were launched in North American and Dubai first before they were released in Taiwan.
To enhance the nation’s economic competitiveness, the government has launched two branding programs to help local firms develop their brands.
But developing a brand “is not about designing a cute logo and plastering the cool sticker on all your products,” Chou said.
RECYCLE: Taiwan would aid manufacturers in refining rare earths from discarded appliances, which would fit the nation’s circular economy goals, minister Kung said Taiwan would work with the US and Japan on a proposed cooperation initiative in response to Beijing’s newly announced rare earth export curbs, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday. China last week announced new restrictions requiring companies to obtain export licenses if their products contain more than 0.1 percent of Chinese-origin rare earths by value. US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent on Wednesday responded by saying that Beijing was “unreliable” in its rare earths exports, adding that the US would “neither be commanded, nor controlled” by China, several media outlets reported. Japanese Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato yesterday also
Taiwan’s rapidly aging population is fueling a sharp increase in homes occupied solely by elderly people, a trend that is reshaping the nation’s housing market and social fabric, real-estate brokers said yesterday. About 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident, the Ministry of the Interior said. The figures have nearly doubled from a decade earlier, Great Home Realty Co (大家房屋) said, as people aged 65 and older now make up 20.8 percent of the population. “The so-called silver tsunami represents more than just a demographic shift — it could fundamentally redefine the
China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) said it expects peak season effects in the fourth quarter to continue to boost demand for passenger flights and cargo services, after reporting its second-highest-ever September sales on Monday. The carrier said it posted NT$15.88 billion (US$517 million) in consolidated sales last month, trailing only September last year’s NT$16.01 billion. Last month, CAL generated NT$8.77 billion from its passenger flights and NT$5.37 billion from cargo services, it said. In the first nine months of this year, the carrier posted NT$154.93 billion in cumulative sales, up 2.62 percent from a year earlier, marking the second-highest level for the January-September
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
RSS