Ged Carroll

Category: taiwan | 中華民國 | 중화민국 | 民国

Ni hao – welcome to the Taiwan category of this blog. This is where I share anything that relates to the island of Taiwan, business issues relating to Taiwan, people from the island of Taiwan, or Taiwanese-specific culture. I don’t post that often about Taiwan but given its strategic location, vibrant culture and importance in global manufacturing I’d like to remedy that.

Taiwan has a range of cultural exports including music, but most of that is focused addressing a Chinese speaking audience. Many of China’s stars actually come from across the strait. Many Chinese factories are actually owned and run by Taiwanese companies with many managers and engineers crossing the straits to work. They were as responsible for the success and opening up as their Hong Kong brethren who moved their factories upstream along the Pearl river delta.

The Republic of China to give it its formal name has had a complex history, acting as a cradle of traditional Chinese culture that was destroyed and remade on the mainland under Mao Zetong. He was looking to build a new country, while Chiang Kai-shek was looking to preserve as much of an old country as he could. The island across the strait was like a seed bank ready to regenerate the mainland at some point in the future.

Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if the Palace museum launched a collaboration with a brand that had great design chops and that I thought was particularly notable that might appear in design as well as Taiwan. Or if there was a new white paper from the government of Taiwan, that might appear in ideas and Taiwan. If there are Taiwanese related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • BBC World Service + more news

    BBC Blogs – Technology & Creativity Blog – Shifting gear with the BBC World Service – interesting opportunities for developers, this mirrors the expansion of Chinese and Russian media internationally. The BBC World Service has also had its funding disrupted in a manner that make it more political. The long term impact of this bias is likely to damage the BBC World Service as a soft power tool

    Apple manufacturer Foxconn just bought iPhone accessory maker Belkin – great move for Foxconn. Foxconn now gets a number of consumer brands including Linksys and can make better Apple accessories faster based on their knowledge of Apple production – if they can maintain secrecy

    What Supreme and streetwear say about fashion today — Quartzy – really nice history write up

    The Oral History of Stüssy: Part 1 | Complex – great background on how the Stüssy brand was built, but with feeling compared to modern day streetwear

    I, Cringely The real problem with self-driving cars – I, Cringely – a meditation about everything that’s wrong in the product process for current day Silicon Valley

    Louis Vuitton’s new men’s designer Virgil Abloh is known for streetwear, not high fashion — Quartzy – A new generation of consumers is emerging with different values and desires than previous buyers of high-end goods. Instead of spending their money on fancy suits, young shoppers are dropping hundreds of dollars on items like logo tees and sock sneakers. As clothes continue to move away from formality, brands from Berluti to Balenciaga are adjusting their wares accordingly – with younger Asian consumers as the growth market of the luxury sector the two worlds are merging. Its only been four decades in the making

    Fwd to CEO: THE MOST VALUABLE BUSINESS TOOL EVER INVENTED – BBH – the fact that this would have to be said to the CEO says a lot about what’s wrong in boardrooms now

    Alibaba to set up Thai logistics centre, extend deepening investment in Southeast Asia | South China Morning Post – interesting how Alibaba is expanding internationally

    Chinese tech firm that once vowed to disrupt Tesla and Apple faces delisting under pile of unpaid debt – the LeEco train wreck continues, at the moment it looks unsolvable unless the government gets more involved

    Sensor Supplier to Self-Driving Uber Defends Tech After Fatality | Bloomberg – it is interesting how the legal ramifications of this will shake out

  • Siri vs Siri + more news

    Siri vs Siri: What Apple’s AI can and can’t do on every Apple device | Macworld – Siri vs Siri implies context based on device, but they need to raise the game in particular on the Mac. More related content here.

    How Russia’s ‘red tourism’ is luring wealthy Chinese visitors bored with Paris and Milan | South China Morning Post – Russian department stores TSUM and GUM become important for foreign Chinese luxury sales

    May braced for Unilever decision on headquarters | FT  – Unilever: ‘stichting’ up a move to the Netherlands, which would make sense. 100VE is a leased building, its overcrowded and a number of the people there were contractors like me. The team that I worked in had already upped sticks to the Netherlands with the roles moving but not many of the people were redeployed, let go or didn’t have their contracts renewed

    Millennial insecurity is reshaping the UK economy – interesting impact – not moving out of region to take a job like I did when I had a degree affecting productivity and entrepreneurship. One could see how Brexit will exasperate things further. It doesn’t imply that there will be a corresponding youthquake to overturn it at a later date

    The Case Against Google – The New York Times – the problem with Found’em and the way the story was started is that it came off a bit cray cray a decade ago when it first popped up. They weren’t cut from the same cloth as Silicon Valley wunderkinder. That and they looked like Microsoft finger puppets. You had the SCO vs. Novell court case over the future of Linux at the time and there was evidence of Microsoft’s finger prints all over it (via Wikipedia): “On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal e-mail detailed how Microsoft had raised up to $106 million via the BayStar referral and other means. Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real. BayStar claimed the deal was suggested by Microsoft, but that no money for it came directly from them. In addition to the Baystar involvement, Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to “Unix and Unix-related patents”, despite the lack of Unix-related patents owned by SCO. This deal was widely seen in the press as a boost to SCO’s finances which would help SCO with its lawsuit against IBM” – And at the time if it had the taint of Microsoft involvement that overwrote any Google wrong. People seem to have forgotten the Judge Jackson trial and what an evil sack of shite Microsoft was shown to be. It would have been really hard sell to the media

    NASA Is Bringing Back Cold War-Era Atomic Rockets to Get to Mars – Bloomberg

    Amazon is merging Prime Now and AmazonFresh – Business Insider – it should add clarity from a brand point of view as well. Now they just need to get the Prime Now app to work properly

    Apple in Talks to Buy Cobalt Directly From Miners – Bloomberg – sounds like a smart use of their capital pile given the rising cost of cobalt due to electric vehicle batteries

    Dr. Penelope Boston: “Seeking the Tricorder: The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life” | Talks at Google – YouTube – interesting challenges in terms of identification, methodology and analysis

    APAC Millennials Lead for Sharing Branded Social Content – GlobalWebIndex Blog

    George Soros may invest more in fighting Big Tech – Axios – the noose is slowly tightening around big technology

    You can call me Al (but you really shouldn’t) – The overclaims of Artificial Intelligence « Comms Planning « Planning Above and Beyond – many technologies take a number of runs to get it right; machine language translation or VoIP being the classic case study. AI takes much more to get it right; this is a timely reminder that we are in an ‘AI summer’ at the moment and may hit an AI winter

    “Just an Ass-Backward Tech Company”: How Twitter Lost the Internet War | Vanity Fair – to be fair this is probably a similar situation with Facebook as well

  • Audrey Li + more things

    My friend and former colleague Audrey Li wrote a great rambling essay. Audrey’s family live in a small town / village in Sichuan province. Sichuan is in the west of China. The essay covers WeChat, payments, crime and the party’s fight against pollution. WeChat scams are surprisingly common for an authoritarian regime that surveils everything. Although Audrey’s Mum seems to have a similar level of technology literacy to my Mum and Dad, I am surprised she uses mobile payments. The battle against pollution has hard costs, which Audrey Li goes into – Smart Phone, No-cash Society, and Jobless — A Short Conversation with My Mother

    Line loses users in 3 of its most important countries – interesting changes in Taiwan, Indonesia and Thailand. I wonder what has eaten into LINE’s market share outside Japan? Maybe LINE has to provide a more fully featured experience like LINE Japan

    Dissecting the Jimmy Choo Michael Kors Deal | News & Analysis | BoF – The Jimmy Choo deal was part of a wider Michael Kors strategy. Michael Kors appears to be focusing on creating a collection of ‘affordable luxury’ brands, a strategy that mirrors Coach’s approach. This differs from companies like LVMH and Kering, which concentrate on high-end luxury brands. Additionally, LVMH and Kering are more established, possessing numerous brands and centralized systems to leverage their combined strengths. I find it interesting that Jimmy Choo is now ‘accessible luxury’. The comparison with Coach is very interesting, it does make one wonder two things:

    • Do American luxury brands have ‘brand permission’ to do high end luxury?
    • Given that accessible luxury and the ‘high-end luxury’ of Kering, LVMH etc. both actually rely on middle class customers for the bulk of their sales – who will win out in a downturn?

    More luxury orientated content here.

    Is Beijing getting serious about selling off state firms? | SCMP – Tencent and Alibaba buying into Unicom could be an interesting dynamic. The big would be around the extra power these groups would get. I could see China going the other way greater state enterprises rather than market liberalisation

    Kaspersky’s stellar antivirus finally goes free | PCWorld – feature limited but powerful

  • Asian Godfathers by Joe Studwell

    I’d read Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works over lunar new year so Asian Godfathers was an obvious follow-on. Studwell dealt directly with the reasons for East Asia’s economic growth and Southeast Asia’s failing to follow them.

    Asian Godfathers

    Studwell attached this same subject through through a different lens. Studwell looks at it through the lens of the business community in these different countries. In Asian Godfathers, he tells the story through Asia’s business tycoons. From the taipans of Hong Kong to Stanley Ho – the Macau gambling tycoon.

    The Asian godfathers were generally cosmopolitan privileged people who where in the right place at the right time. Some of them had colourful origin stories as black marketers selling fake medicines and blockade runners. Mao’s China relied on business tycoons across Asia when the country had closed itself off from the world.

    Studwell tells of an elderly tycoon who goes to sleep in a bedroom with no windows, such was his paranoia about revenge from the families of people who had been ‘treated’ with his black market antibiotics decades earlier.

    This also explains the paranoia that Hong Kong’s tycoons had over politicised youth in Hong Kong  as well. These are the people who are most likely to kick back against their rent seeking businesses.

    But these Asian Godfathers are just a side show in a wider panorama of political greed and incompetence across Southeast Asia. Asian Godfathers is more like Hotel Babylon than an economics analysis like How Asia Works, yet it delivers its message forcefully. More related content here.

  • Lights out production lines

    Lights out production lines reminded me of my childhood. If you are of a certain age, ‘hand made by robots’ brings to mind the Fiat Strada / Ritmo a thirtysomething year old hatchback design that was built in a factory with a high degree of automation for the time.

    Fiat subsidiary Comau created Robogate, a highly automated system that speeds up body assembly. Robogate was eventually replaced in 2000. The reality is that ‘hand made by robots’ had a liberal amount of creative licence. Also it didn’t enable Fiat to shake off its rust bucket image. Beneath the skin, the car was essentially a Fiat 127. Car factories still aren’t fully automated.

    Foxconn is looking to automate its own production lines and create products that truly are ‘hand-built by robots’. Like Fiat it has its own robots firm which is manufacturing 10,000 robots per year.

    Foxconn has so far focused on production lines for larger product final assembly (like televisions) and workflow on automated machine lines: many consumer products use CNC (computer numeric control) machines. That’s how Apple iPhone and Macs chassis’ are made. These totally automated lines are called ‘lights out production lines’ by Foxconn.

    Foxconn is looking to automate production because China is undergoing a labour shortfall as the population getting older. Foxconn uses a lot of manual workers for final assembly of devices Apple’s iPhone because the components are tightly packed together.

    Forty years ago, Japanese manufacturers conquered high end and low end consumer electronics with pick-and-place machines to automate electronics production, Nokia went on to build its phone business on similar automated lines. Globalisation ironically facilitated hand assembly of exceptionally dense electronics devices.

    It will be a while before Foxconn manages to automate this as robotic motor control isn’t fine enough to achieve this yet. In order for that to happen you need a major leap forward in harmonic gearing. This isn’t a problem that software or machine learning can solve easily. More related pieces of jargon can be found here.

    More information
    Foxconn boosting automated production in China | DigiTimes – (paywall)