Hyundai Motor Co, Korea's largest automaker, will allow Taiwan's Sanyang Industrial Co (
Honda, Japan's second-largest automaker, severed ties with Sanyang in January to set up its own Taiwan subsidiary to sell automobiles.
Japan's second-largest automaker will initially spend NT$170 million to set up the subsidiary with operations beginning in March, said Satoshi Toshida (
Toshida declined to spell out the reason for the break-up at a press conference held in Taipei, saying only that the new firm will "reduce production costs" and "increase competitiveness."
But Honda may have pulled out because of Sanyang's decision to buy three vehicle companies in China and Vietnam in 2000 from parent ChinFon Group (
"Sanyang will stop making Honda automobiles after our parts inventory is diminished, but Hyundai will revive us," spokesman Yeh Fong-ming (
Sanyang plans to convert its production lines to Hyundai's specifications by September and produce 4,000 Hyundai cars this year, Yeh said. Sanyang plans to produce about 6,000 Honda cars this year, compared with 17,000 in 2001.
Honda last accounted for about 6 percent of Taiwan's vehicle market, including cars imported from Japan.
Amid the nation's worst recession on record, Taiwan's automobile market contracted a sharp 17.4 percent last year, with about 347,433 cars sold, down from more than 420,467 the previous year, local media reported, citing statistics from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
While some industry experts have expressed optimism that sales would recover in the third quarter of the year if the domestic economy rebounds, consumers may remain cautious, said Jeffrey Shen (
"Our studies found that sales will be about 350,000 units this year," Shen told the Taipei Times during an interview in early March.
Taiwan is projected to lose a working-age population of about 6.67 million people in two waves of retirement in the coming years, as the nation confronts accelerating demographic decline and a shortage of younger workers to take their place, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan experienced its largest baby boom between 1958 and 1966, when the population grew by 3.78 million, followed by a second surge of 2.89 million between 1976 and 1982, ministry data showed. In 2023, the first of those baby boom generations — those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s — began to enter retirement, triggering
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