Elias Ek has experienced many ups and downs doing business in Taiwan. But over the past 11 years, he has transitioned his telemarketing company Enspyre into a profitable business-to-business company with 40 employees.
Two years ago, Ek, who counts Oracle, eBay and General Motors among the companies he’s worked with, began writing a book so that expats wanting to do business in the country might capitalize on his experiences as a non-Taiwanese entrepreneur in Taiwan.
How to Start a Business in Taiwan is a step-by-step guide for starting up a company in Taiwan, and focuses on its economic and social culture, which Ek says can sometimes be tough to navigate.
Photo: Ian Stephenson
STAFF LOYALTY
Ek said that a start-up needs to get a few things right when it comes to employee benefits. He cited a company’s reputation, monthly salary and the Lunar New Year bonus as important factors influencing prospective employees.
“The work environment and a sense of accomplishment are important, but save the benefit money for salaries and Chinese New Year bonuses,” he said. Ek has done this, and found that his staff responded with warmth and loyalty.
In 2003, Ek’s Taiwanese wife passed away due to a congenital heart condition. He grieved, sought counseling and neglected his business for months.
“I was not in any condition to concentrate on the business but was lucky that a number of my employees picked up the workload,” he said.
Another challenge facing potential employers is the lack of internship programs at the university level, Ek said. But, he added, there’s a work around: start your own.
“All businesses should have an internship program as they can identify potential employees,” he said.
Over the past four years, Ek’s company has taken in 120 interns and hired 20 of them part time.
“I also asked the interns to blog about the internship so potential future interns can get an even better idea of the opportunity,” he said.
Ek also broached the topic of red tape in Taiwan. Expect large amounts of paperwork to acquire a loan for the start-up, he said. Once acquired, however, it becomes much easier to deal with the bureaucracy — provided you know how to present your projects in Chinese.
“From my own personal experience, small loans are hard to acquire for a start-up. But once the business is started the government does extend grants to companies for their next growth stage,” he said.
He added that government regulations are foreigner friendly and Taiwan is one of a handful of countries that allows foreigners to own 100 percent of the company without a local partner.
“The problem is the layer below, where local businesses are not aware of the scope of the regulations which are inclusive of foreigners,” he said.
Taiwan’s English education system is being pulled apart by three opposing forces. Bilingual Nation 2030 pulls students toward English and global communication. Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness pulls them toward digital judgment, verification and AI-mediated work. But Taiwan’s old exam culture pulls them back toward memorization, grammar drills, timed reading and correct answers. If the education system keeps using old exams to define success, it risks producing graduates who are neither genuinely bilingual nor genuinely AI-ready, but trained for tasks machines can already perform. The first force is Bilingual Nation 2030. Launched in 2018, the policy aimed to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect
It seems every few days one bumps into one of those “real man” comments in which Taiwan is urged to “face reality” or similar, and “make a deal,” with the speaker implying that soon it will be too late. “Deal” advocates always present themselves as having a superior grip on reality, and the manly ability to make the “hard choice.” Their testosterone-laden language often echoes that of Taiwan sellout advocates. Note that such commentary always specifies a process (“make a deal, work with, make progress”), never the end state of what occupation by a violent authoritarian colonialist state will entail. In
“Taiwan’s Opposition Leader Comes to US With a Message Straight Out of Beijing” read a May 31 headline in the Wall Street Journal. Top US administration officials and members of Congress almost certainly read the WSJ, and if there was a bullet point takeaway that people in Washington should absorb ahead of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) arrival in DC on June 9, that headline is it. The last few columns have discussed this very topic, and the timing is not coincidental. While those top officials likely do not read the Taipei Times, judging by the number
As someone who normally steers clear of books with “transcendence” or “metaphysics” in their subtitles, this reviewer — a casual observer of local belief systems since the 1990s — found Fabian Graham’s Money God Temples in Taiwan a challenging read. Those who’ve only dipped their toes into temple culture will likely need to parse several sections with special care if they’re to keep up with the author, a British ethnographic researcher whose previous books have investigated religious practices among ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. This scholarly volume examines a facet of Taiwan’s religious landscape that didn’t exist a century ago, and
RSS