Dell and Apple's Taiwanese partners; IP protection in Taiwan

With around 80 percent of the world's notebooks manufactured by Taiwan-based firms, the island gets lots of visitors from Dell, Intel, AMD, Apple, Sony, to name just a few. Alex Gruzen, senior vice president of Dell Product Group, discusses Dell's parterships with its Taiwanese manufacturers in a recent Digitimes article.

The BBC has an article on how some of Apple's manufacturing partners, mostly Taiwan-based companies with factories in China, are exploiting China's abundant supply of cheap labor and lack of worker-protection laws. The BBC comments that Apple's MP3 products carry the statement: "Designed in California, Made in China." This is correct but fails to include the very significant role of Taiwan-based firms in the design and manufacturing of the iPod, Nano, and Shuffle MP3 players.

When we think of intellectual property theft, the copying of good-old text books often goes under the radar, but with books like this costing more than $100, it's no wonder that the American Chamber of Commerce has expressed disatisfaction with Taiwan's half-assed enforcement of its intellectual property laws in a recent white paper.








innovation management in Asia