The establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) on the last day of 2015 is a major milestone in the regional economic integration agenda in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), offering opportunities in the form of a market with potential value of US$2.6 trillion and over 622 million consumers. In 2014 the AEC was reportedly the third largest economy in Asia and the seventh...

Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) recently announced that a memorandum of understanding (MOU) enabling cooperation in the field of pharmaceuticals and medical products has been signed on January 14, 2016 with the Warsaw Trade Office in Taipei (Polish representative office in Taiwan). According to the MOU, Taiwan's Food and Drug Administration (TFDA) under the Ministry of Health and W...

The Chungkang Export Processing Zone in central Taiwan, one of several export processing zones on the island, reported fruitful results from its 2015 program to attract investments, including 18 new or capital-increase investment projects that totaled about NT$7.63 billion (US$229.7 million), outstripping its original goal, according to the Export Processing Zone Administration (EPZA) under the M...

Taiwan's Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) of the manufacturing industry increased by 4.7 percentage points from a month earlier to 51.3 percent in January, 2016, ending a downtrend over the past six months, to post the first reading above 50 percent since July 2015, according to Chung-Hua Institute for Economic Research (CIER), to which C. S. Wu, its president, attributes mainly an increase in Ne...

Chris Wood, Representative of the British Office Taipei, the de facto British embassy in Taiwan, has announced that the British Department for Business, Innovation and Skill (BDBIS) lists Taiwan among its 12 most crucial global markets. In an effort to maximize British exports to Taiwan and interactions between high-level officials from the two sides, the department has designated Co-Chairman ...

After a disappointing year in 2015 when exports were widely reported to have declined for many months consecutively, Taiwan’s economy may probably regain momentum this year, as total output value by local manufacturing industries is forecast to bottom out by 0.96 percent year on year in 2016, according to a recent report issued by the Industrial Economics and Knowledge Center (IEK), a market rese...

Chairman Terry Guo of the Foxconn Technology Group says he is quite confident of outbidding other suitors to acquire the financially struggling Sharp Corp. of Japan due to his group's most attractive offer. Guo also said the outcome will be disclosed as early as Feb. 5, touting his group is the right choice for Sharp. According to a Bloomberg report online of Jan. 31, Guo’s offer is designed t...

According to the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) of Taiwan’s Cabinet, the island’s economy grew only 0.85 percent year on year in 2015, hitting a six-year low and failing to meet the modest growth goal of one percent that the government had tried to secure. The Cabinet-level organization attributes the disappointing growth rate mostly to the island’s weaker-tha...

With its newly procured airplanes to take off on new routes beginning in the second half of this year, Taiwan-based China Airlines Ltd., one of the island’s top-2 airlines by size, looks to build momentum in passenger loading, cost efficiencies via reduced fuel consumption, as well as enhanced brand prestige with the advanced airplanes in the years ahead. China Airlines ordered 14 A350-900 lon...

Only three days after the presidential election in Taiwan that voted into office Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party, the first female for the top job in Taiwan, the business climate survey released on Jan. 19 by the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei (AmCham Taipei) shows only 47 percent of the polled 406 voting members of the Taipei-headquartered chamber feel optimistic toward ...