Acer, ASUS grow in double digits, cf 3.6% for entire industry.
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People certainly aren’t spending any money traveling right now, and many are doing all their work remotely and through Zoom, so this tracks.
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There was crowd at the laptop area on the ground floor in Guang Hwa Digitial Market. Usually, that area is empty.
I was going to build my dad a basic desktop from Coolpc, but they said it was a 4 day waitlist! Went next door and they said 40 minutes.
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I saw that today. Work from home is here to stay. Time for upgrades.
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Schooling via Zoom won’t last though.
Schools in NY don’t use Zoom. It’s not secure. And I see more and more online learning happening, simply for cost cutting porpoises.
True, but it won’t maintain pandemic levels.
My district cut hundreds of jobs, and has a 22 million dollar budget cut. I think some aspect of online is here to stay. Just so we won’t get caught with your pants down like last Spring ever again.
Kids need laptops too.
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Not for school as much maybe but for work it’s very much here to stay. We are using Zoom more than ever eight or nine months in…
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The reasons salaries have been stuck for the last decade:
- Hallowing out of manufacturing to China.
- Phones replacing laptops and Taiwan’s failure to create a lasting name brand phone.
- Regional trade integration leaving Taiwan out for geopolitical reasons.
Now the reverse is happening.
- U.S.-China trade war forcing companies to reshore.
- Pandemic induces work-at-home, inducing demand for laptops and allowing Acer and ASUS to make a killing.
- U.S. and Taiwan will start considering an FTA, giving other Asian countries the courage to do the same.
You just never know.
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Cram schooling might survive through zoom. I am taking some singing lessons through it and it is all good. I agree it will not replace schooling totally but it will certainly make some inroads.
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None of the fuel that’s being added to Taiwan’s economic fire is guaranteed to increase salaries though. From what I see, it’s more likely that almost all the gains will go to those at the top.
Taiwan is a prosperous place and has been for some time now. If there was any pressure for salaries of the working class to increase, it probably would have already happened.
Sadly, most of these stores sell no computers made in Taiwan. pathetic really.
Pre-tax incomes in Taiwan are the most equitable among advanced economies.
While the trickle-down Republican philosophy is largely bogus, it’s true that each engineering job creates five non-engineering jobs locally.
Proof: look at Shinzu. While most of that wealth is generated by IT companies, it’s certainly not just engineers who are enjoying it.
Yes and salaries were increasing fast until a decade ago.
Are they selling Acer or ASUS laptops? What matters is good engineering jobs, not necessarily where they’re manufactured.
But yeah, this waiguo de yueliang bijiao yuan syndrome is obnoxious.
There is some weird taxation on products made in Taiwan being sold cheaply in Taiwan. I vaguely remember it was to do with exports. Maybe someone else can go into more detail about it, but there is a good reason Taiwan vendors generally do not sell or push made in Taiwan computer products in Taiwan but rather export them.
Assuming this is accurate, that’s really not saying much these days.
Well I lived and worked in Silicon Valley for most of my life, so I know what engineers make and while there’s no doubt that engineers here are comparatively well-compensated, they make peanuts compared to what similarly educated and experienced engineers can make elsewhere. Newly minted CompSci grads in the US going to a Big Tech company in Silicon Valley routinely make multiples of what engineers with Masters and PhDs and years of experience make in Taiwan.
The brain drain phenomenon doesn’t lie.
https://mdp.berkeley.edu/taiwans-brain-drain-has-caused-people-turning-heads-to-china/
https://www.ft.com/content/6eab0c1c-167f-11ea-9ee4-11f260415385
I grew up in the Bay Area. Of course Silicon engineers are paid more.
One factor is you have to account for the fact that Taiwan manipulates its currency. A $60,000 engineering salary in Taiwan is about $150,000 US if you adjust for prices.
But that’s not the point. The point is that income from engineering jobs will make everyone around them better off.
Furthermore, engineering incomes are bound to rise with Taiwan becoming an AI R&D hub.
Greetings fellow Bay person. 
How do you figure? Using the numbers from the cost of living index here, a salary of $60,000 USD ($1.73 million NTD) in Taipei gives you purchasing power of just under $90,000 USD ($2.5 million NTD) in San Francisco.
And don’t forget this is comparing salaries for new grads in the US versus experienced engineers in Taiwan. At a company like Google or Facebook you could easily be at $250,000+ total comp in a few years.
And there are a lot more companies in the US that compensate their employees very well. In Taiwan, it’s a few.
But you have to keep them or brain drain will eventually take its toll.
I don’t see much evidence of that sadly.