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Mainland Displays Buying Power in Island Province
This week's Computex Taipei computer show attracted hundreds of shoppers from the United States, Europe and Japan.
But the trade delegation whose buying power attracted the most attention was from China's mainland, which until recently had long been considered a technology backwater.
Over the past decade, Taiwan region's firms have set up assembly lines in mainland to turn out personal computers and spare parts, taking advantage of cheap manpower.
The investments helped turn mainland into the world's third largest computer hardware maker last year with total output valued at US$25.5 billion. About 70 percent of the products were produced by Taiwanese-invested firms on the mainland.
Mainland's computer output, behind the United States and Japan, marked an impressive 38 percent growth. Taiwan ranked close behind at US$23 billion with a 10 percent growth.
The mainland delegates to the weeklong trade show, including executives from its two largest computer firms, were shopping for laptops, hand-held computers and advanced motherboards not yet produced in mainland.
Legend Holdings Ltd, mainland's largest computer maker, will spend much of its annual purchase budget of 20 billion yuan (US$2.5 billion), to buy Taiwanese products, said Yang Yuanqing, president of the company.
"Taiwanese makers have a leading edge in research and development and chipset design. More important, they have a better understanding of the Chinese mainland market than American firms," Yang told reporters.
The mainland orders are highly valued as Taiwanese firms struggled with sagging demand from the West amid the global economic slowdown.
Asustek Computer Inc, a leading Taiwanese motherboard and laptop maker, displayed at its booth computers using Intel's latest Pentium 4 microprocessor, products to be formally marketed by August.
Joe Hsieh, Asustek's marketing manager, said the company has several factories in mainland to produce computers that have been on the market for years, but that state-of-the-art models are produced in Taiwan where engineers work closely with chipmakers and other component suppliers for product innovation. "China's mainland is gaining in technology, but Taiwan has access to the latest tech information," he said.
But mainland's potential to be a high-tech power cannot be neglected.
Raff Liu, chairman of Syscom Computer Engineering Co, said his company operates a design center in the central mainland city of Xian, employing 100 young engineers to design software for Internet appliances at less than one-third the cost of similar operations in Taiwan.
"We must utilize mainland's advantages, much the same way American firms built assembly lines in Taiwan 20 years ago," Liu said.
(www.chinadaily.com.cn)
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