Doing business in Taiwan, like "high level" stuff

So… Basically just say for example you design and make a product (all made in tw) and its something that will fix a “third world type issue” that Taiwan has that the governments and relevant agencies are trying to fix but you designed something to be at least 85% + efficient and more cost effective and could get the job done quicker.

So if you being a foreigner (white or black person) how would you go about getting it “all started and happening”.

From what I’ve seen and heard, Taiwan is a place where you can do just about anything and very business and development friendly but since most foreigners just teach English and maybe work in tech stuff with rhat nomad visa, id imagine something high level is unheard of here. But lots have said that locals sort of trust white people more in some cases because… idk?

So overall if you were to attempt something like this whats the % chance of it happening? Im guessing you firstly would have to find a town or area where you want to do it and get to know the local politicians somehow and build connections.

Idk, maybe just a pipe dream but idk, any advice on how something like this would work? Thanks.

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Be careful that the thing you think the government are trying to fix is actually something they are trying to fix and not something they are just pretending to fix…

However, if you have a product that solves a problem that they actually do want to fix, there is no reason you couldn’t register a company and sell it to them. It takes 1-3 months to register a company here as a foreigner and including the 1 year virtual office address contract, the whole registration might cost you around 25,000 to 30,000 TWD if you do the applications yourself.

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You want to open a business?

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Absolutely!!

And if anybody has any doubts on this remember these words.

New ARC number system.

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It’s very difficult to get business from them without some kind of connections.
The chance of getting ripped off by those ‘partners’ is also not small. A lot of officials and also private managers are corrupt here I have seen it with my own eyes. You may need to make it worth their while one way or another way . I sound too pessimistic but if you are talking about selling into a big organization it’s not easy .

But go get some IP or patent or keep your trade secrets and try anyway.

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What categories of things are those?

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Just be careful don’t step on government or private organizations turf, and be ready to have it stolen.

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What do u mean? Like if a similar product exist already

I mean if you find an organization or someone to cooperate, they may just steal the idea and concept and leave you out in the cold.

By being careful I mean don’t make them look bad or look like they’re failing or look like they can’t come up with the idea or do it themselves. Find a way to cooperate.

It’s the Taiwan way.

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First get your information changed. Most foreigners in Taiwan do not teach English. There is no digital nomad visa either. Being a foreigner is not about being black or white. There are more Japanese and Thai’s Indonesians Vietnamese living in Taiwan than there are black or white people.

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What’s the thing that you can do but locals can’t? If it’s just an idea then the only way is connections. If you have an actual system in place and a moat to protect your product then all you need is trade shows or seminars or some such. Just go in there and start talking to people. You’ll be selling it in no time.

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I thought you were the one with the idea of what category to be fixed?

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for all things, low, as most new things have a low chance of success. Probably lower if trying to sell to govt , as they likely prefer established / known players. Lower if you don’t have a business plan. Even lower if you don’t know how to get started. All that said, plenty of people try anyway, and some will be super successful.

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Connections first, then extreme luck that the connection/s that helped you don’t steal your ideas and leave you with nadda.

Our companies work with a lot of technology that simply isn’t available in Taiwan and fortunately for us Taiwan (nor China) currently has the experience or expertise to develop said technologies. But I give them an A+ for effort when it comes to trying to reverse engineer said products because from day one they’ve been trying to copy.

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So ill try and get into detail with what im on about, the actual product fits more of a “keeping the environment clean” type category. I cant say on here incase someone steals the idea, not saying yous will but since anyone can view this forum from the internet. Lol.

Anyway so ill make up a scenario and base my idea on it kinda. Lets use…idk… Internet speed as an example. Lets say that everyone in Taiwan has internet connection and everyone should be able to get 100mbps, but only Taipei and a few other cities get that in some districts, while the rest of the country only gets 50mbps. Now the areas that have 100mbps have Fibre optic cables that run under the streets and before they all connect to the internet exchange thing they all meet up at this “box… Lets call it magicbox123” and this magicbox123 most countries have and its needed to make the internet 100mbps.

Now in the 50mbps areas, there is no fibre optic its copper wires. Now the governments solution is to replace all the wires with fibre optic cables to everyones home and all those fibre cables will connect to magicbox123 before connecting to the exchange thing. Now lets say doing that will take 7 to 10 years per town/district and whatnot and you have a solution that would make it only 1 to 2 years at max in each area to fix the issue.

So if you made a smaller version of magicbox123 but each smaller version is customized inside to be a little different depending on the town/area and…certain area requirements may make each version different inside, and the solution is to install a magicbox123 “mini” throughout the area maybe say it connects onto the copper wires every 1km along the freeway or something, and then that all of a sudden makes the internet 100mbps for everyone at least 95% of the time, but the speed will only reduce to say 70mbps when it typhoons.

Now as for ip theft, what if all this could be semi hand made, like the exterior is say… 6ft x 6ft x 15ft for example and you only needed the box and a few other things made up, so you could get one factory to just make the box and another factory could make the other stuff. So lets say the internal components there is 4 sections that make this work. So each section goes from say Capacitors, filters, …idk RAM, CPU (best i could come up with lol).

So ill just choose a random place in Taiwan, say Miaoli county, Tongluo township, say the magicbox123 mini needs 2 capacitors, 2 filters, 4gb ram and 1ghz cpu for this to work and Gongguan township needs the same but the ram has to be 6gb and the cpu 2ghz, but the box that it all fits in is the same size and all the components i could connect up myself.

So if factory 1 makes the box and the factory 2 makes the ram, then no ip can really be stolen right?? Since its a bunch of different components and since i would assemble it all the factories probably wouldnt really know what it all was, especially if they already make very similar stuff by default just this would be a different size or layout.

Hopefully this example make sense, best i could come up with (though in the real world using fibre is better thb, Australia could learn from NZ for once).

You just made 0% sense buddy. How old are you and how much weed do you smoke?

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High-speed wireless internet via relays with directional antennae, got it!

Yeah, anyway, whatever it is, use standard hardware as much as possible (so your sources don’t know anything “special”) and have a as-secure-as-possible (i.e. hard to reverse-engineer) “black box” containing the brains, that you sub-contract separate parts for manufacture and you assemble and program yourself as the last step.

You’re basically looking at what every tech manufacturer does…

So just to clarify obviously this example makes no sense in the real world, there is no such thing to my knowledge, just using it as an example to just pretend such thing exists so you can see the process behind what im talking about and how i was thinking of doing it.

How basically such thing already exists in some places and just making a smaller version of it that’s customized for specific areas where the proper thing doesnt exist and attaches to existing infrustructure to “fix the problem”.