AM Lecture 4

Management > Asian Management > Culture-organisational background > Laoban characteristics > Structure > Effectiveness of structure > Guanxiqiye > Management problems > Problems and solutions > Implications for management > Internationalisation > Superior strategies > Further superiority

Further superiority

Taiwan firms competing in the global market have yet more superior methods:

• The Taiwan IT industry is 3rd in the world, after Japan and the US in $ outputs. This is quite an achievement, since Taiwan has no big brand names.
• Taiwan firms have strategic positions in partnerships in the global supply chain. For example, Japan and the US are heavily dependent on Taiwan for supplies, so it is in a good position to bargain.
• A study showed that they make extensive use of "postponement strategies", which could be a paradigm for other strategies.
• A classic thing they did was buying technology from MNCs, improving upon it as selling it back to them! They used this technique to out-compete MNCs by also using the new technology to their own advantages. They were in effect playing MNCs at their own game.
• In a similar vein, Taiwan firms have been known to tempt Chinese workers, who have been trained in the US, back to Taiwan to exploit their skills and compete with MNCs. This is known as a "reverse brain drain".