Just posted on my Computerworld blog about Taiwan's recent evolution into a high-tech manufacturing and engineering powerhouse. In it, I note the way Taiwan has, in the course of two decades, gone from manufacturing Christmas lights to designing CPUs. It really is a remarkable transformation, but we should remember that Japan and parts of the United States have experienced similar transformations from low-tech manufacturing centers to high-tech, service-oriented economies, albeit at a much slower rate.
One thing I didn't mention in my Computerworld post was my own extremely minor observation post overlooking the Taiwanese economic transformation. In 1993 and 1994, I worked at two small import-export companies in Taipei. One, Viking Co., was very old-school -- the owner had made a mint selling pens and cheap plastic goods to Europe, the United States, and the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s, but as of 1993 was not able to adapt to the new environment caused by the appearance of cheaper manufacturers on the mainland. Calls, orders, and requests for quotes from once-dependendable customers were drying up, and he couldn't figure out how to stem the flow.
The other company, Ben Novelty Co., did figure out how to adapt. Ben Novelty was a family-owned operation that had gone from making novelties to lamps and more expensive housewares, and had started outsourcing manufacturing to China. It realized that local manufacturing was dying, as Taiwanese wages couldn't compete with Chinese wages. Once I accompanied Ben (the owner) to a small lamp factory in Taipei's industrial suburbs, and was struck by the types of workers there -- almost all were high-school aged girls, and some older women. These were the only types of people who would work for low wages at a dreary lamp assembly line.
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