Taiwan businesses are apparently unmoved by the potential threat terrorism poses to their business operations, according to corporate security firms.
While there has been many inquiries about terrorism in Japan and Hong Kong, Moray Taylor-Smith, senior managing director of Pinkerton in North Asia, said they were yet to receive one in Taiwan.
"Nobody has put Taiwan too high up on the threat list," he said.
Instead, most of Pinkerton's business in Taiwan continues to come from purely business-related investigations into intellectual property rights infringements, kickbacks and theft of trade secrets, said Taylor-Smith.
James Tunkey, a director at another corporate security firm -- Kroll Associates in Hong Kong -- agrees that the security risk to businesses from terrorism in Taiwan is minimal.
Instead Taiwanese companies -- already known for their IPR infringements -- will increasingly become the victims as they relocate to China, Tunkey said.
"The major problems of protection of intellectual property and process technology are really going to be the key things for the Taiwanese," Tunkey said.
Other major concerns for Taiwanese entrepreneurs in China and around the region are kidnappings, product tampering and hostile actions by local partners, he said.
"In places like China, locals seek to use their own relationships to get police to muscle the Taiwanese partner around," Tunkey said.
But according to Taylor-Smith, internal issues such as kickbacks, employee screening and unproductive employees have dominated the thoughts of security planners at businesses in Asia will continue causing the most concern.
Internal issues took up the majority of the top 10 positions in a survey conducted by Pinkerton of 74 companies throughout the Asia-Pacific in July prior to the September attacks on the US.
"Companies may pay a great deal of attention to protecting against external threats, but it is usually the `enemy within' that creates the most damage," according to Pinkerton's report on the survey.
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