Trip Down Memory Lane....

Yesterday I found this great 1994 New York Times article about the Hsin Chu science park. It provides a great historical perspective on the origins of the high-tech industry in Taiwan. At that time some of the big companies (e.g. HTC) had not even been born and TSMC was still only a regional player. The article says:

After a slow and hesitant start, the Science-Based Industrial Park, home to 150 high-technology businesses, generated nearly $5 billion in sales last year, propelling Taiwan into the ranks of major high-tech producers. It has, for example, about half the world market in scanners and monitors, about 30 percent of the market in network cards and terminals and about 10 percent of the personal computer market.

The park is also changing the kind of goods Taiwan makes. In the last decade, much of the labor-intensive, low-tech industries such as clothing, shoe and toy manufacturing that spurred the island's economic growth have been displaced by high-tech industries, which make up a rapidly growing percentage of its exports.

"I think the park is very important for Taiwan, especially during industrial restructuring," said Wu Rong-i, the president of the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research, a private research and consulting firm. "It took five or six years really to see a response. But then it started to demonstrate good performance."

The idea for this park -- about 1,000 acres of silicon chip factories, computer and telecommunications manufacturing, research labs, office buildings, schools and restaurants -- sprang from the early successes of the Silicon Valley, the swath of computer industries that spilled south from Palo Alto and Stanford University.

"The original thought was that since there were so many Taiwanese scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley, that if we could get some of them to come back and start businesses, they could help us start a high-tech industry here," said H. Steve Hsieh, the director general of the science park and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. "Many people went to the United States and stayed forever, many for political reasons because Taiwan was under martial law. Some of these people got into middle-age crisis. So we've tried to recruit them to come here and start high-tech companies."

Today, the 150 companies here cover an array of high-tech industries, including the manufacture of personal computers and peripherals, the fabrication of integrated circuits, specialized telecommunications equipment and design, optical-electronics and, less successfully, a handful of biotechnology companies.

Since over the next year I will be doing a dissertation looking at the the influence of Chinese culture on strategies in Taiwanese high-tech companies, I found the following statements really interesting:

Yau You-wen was one of the 1,004 who returned home last year. "I was at Stanford in applied physics," he said, "and went on to Honeywell, and later I.B.M. What brought me back were the opportunities. The gap is disappearing between the U.S. and Taiwan." Now, Mr. Yau is the director of quality and reliability at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the largest fabricator of integrated circuits in Taiwan. Hybrid Corporate Culture.

Mr. Yau said that the corporate culture of Taiwan Semiconductor was more American than Taiwanese. In part, this is because the company has an American president, Donald W. Brooks, and because of the predominance of American customers. Indeed, the company's success has come not from creating its own chips but from building the factories and the technology to manufacture designs for integrated circuits created elsewhere, usually in the United States.

This was 14-years ago. What will be interesting is to see if the American culture has survived or if the advent of more and more homegrown talent moving into these companies has turned the corporate culture more towards a Taiwanese corporate culture. What will also be interesting, if it is possible, is to examine the difference between the semiconductor companies that employed many returning Taiwanese and the home-grown companies like Hon Hai Precision Technologies and Tatung.

Anyway, I thought the article was interesting and worthwhile sharing. You can read the whole article at the link below.

New York Times: High-Tech Taiwanese Come Home