Following the recent wage increases in China, the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) is scheduled to hold an investment summit tomorrow aimed at luring more China-based Taiwanese firms to invest at home.
The ministry also hopes the one-day summit at the Taipei International Convention Center can show overseas Taiwanese businesspeople how to take advantage of the nation’s research and development.
“With the economic pact between Taiwan and China, more Taiwanese firms will increase their presence locally,” Ling Chia-yuh (凌家裕), director-general of the ministry’s investment services department, told reporters on Friday.
Some homegrown companies actually gained fame by expanding into China, but they have been there for too long and need government assistance to navigate the investment environment there, Ling said. Officials said the department had seen a surge in inquiries from overseas Taiwanese businesses asking about financing, tax rebates and land allocation, to better diversify their risks by increasing investments in Taiwan.
The rise in inquiries came after Hon Hai Group (鴻海), which operates under the “Foxconn” (富士康) brand and is the world’s biggest contract electronics parts maker, and Japanese carmaker Honda raised their Chinese workers’ pay to cope with labor disputes in the past few weeks.
Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) told shareholders on June 8 that the group planned to combat the higher wages in China by moving some production lines to Taiwan if the government could provide Hon Hai with attractive labor and other terms at proposed free-trade port areas and special economic zones.
“It is obvious that the labor cost [in China] is no longer low,” the General Chamber of Commerce (全國商業總會) said in a statement on Friday.
“Taiwanese businesses have lost their advantages in setting up factories in China ... Many companies are thinking about relocating some of their production lines back to Taiwan,” the Taipei-based business association said in the statement.
Ling said on Friday that Tingyi (Cayman Islands) Holding Corp (康師傅控股), a Taiwanese-owned company that is the biggest maker of instant noodles in China, is also mulling expanding its production lines in Taiwan and transporting goods from Taiwan to its markets in central and southern China to save costs.
Speakers at tomorrow’s summit will include government and private sector officials, such as spokespeople from optical product maker Ginko International Co (金可國際), carmaker Yulon Group (裕隆集團) and tech gadget retailer CyberMart (賽博數碼).
There will also be consultancy services available for overseas Taiwanese companies on how to apply for a primary listing on Taiwan’s bourse or a secondary listing by issuing Taiwan Depository Receipts (TDRs), the officials said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The