Taiwan’s iconic hi-tech sector drifts towards India, Thailand, Vietnam to hedge political risk
- Executives discuss why major Taiwanese tech firms have been shifting toward South and Southeast Asia, rather than expand at home or in mainland China
With an eye on migrating risks, Taiwan-based Acer, the world’s No 5 PC vendor by market size, expanded its influence in India last year by licensing its name to a local start-up.
The move came as the 48-year-old company has been watching other players in the Taiwanese tech-hardware supply chain move some of their production to other countries, according to chief operating officer Jerry Kao.
“The supply chain is moving out of Taiwan already,” Kao said on the sidelines of the Computex Taipei 2024 tech show in early June. “They’re going to Vietnam or Thailand or somewhere else. We follow the trend.
“As long as we see some risk, we will start to diversify. We have local assembly in countries like India and Indonesia, so if there’s something wrong we can shift to those factories.”
Acer – with 7,725 employees and NT$241.31 billion in revenue last year – has joined other major Taiwanese tech developers by embracing what analysts have seen as a shift over the past few years toward South and Southeast Asia, rather than opting to expand at home or in mainland China.
We won’t pull out of China, but we will add in Southeast Asia or South America
For the past 40 years, Taiwan’s US$130 billion tech industry has supplied the world with PCs, phones and other consumer electronics plus their components. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), for example, is the world’s largest contract chipmaker.
