What's your favourite Taiwanese brand/company

I have lived in Taiwan quite a while now and come to admire some brands/companies in Taiwan and associate some as being more ‘Taiwanese’ than others. For food I have to say Imei always has quality products, it runs it’s owns stores in little towns all over the island and has been around since the 1930s. Ten Ren Cha’s stores and drink outlets are top quality, drink and food wise…if they changed their marketing style for the West they could escape out of Chinatown :slight_smile:.
In electronics HTC has impressed me these last few years, it makes me a little bit proud that a Taiwanese heaquartered company can make world beating phones. They show the potential here of companies that are willing to incorporate foreign offices and design to become multinational. Acer and Asus are kind of there but not quite, Acer took the route of low margin quick revenue and Asus is for nerds and gamers and also took a ‘cost-down’ approach in the main. Giant makes cracking bikes as do many other bike companies and parts suppliers.
85C does what it does very well…good coffee and okay cake for a few bucks. They have a huge future in China.

Brands and companies that don’t impress me here would be President/7-11/Family Mart which sells a lot of sweet crap in it’s shops and too much plastic packaging, just bad for health AND the environment. Carrefour (although not Taiwanese) and RT Mart are very boring and sells a lot of processed stuff to me but Matsushita has a good mix (that being Japanese originally of course). I’ve tried La New shoes here, they weren’t bad but a bit overpriced for what you get and the design was quite plain.

Got a very soft spot for Super Supau, the isotonic miracle drink.

+1 for HTC

Me thinks that may be Japanese. :ponder:

Datong is a company to be reckoned with; they have their finger in soooo many pies here. I second IMEI; good ice cream!

HTC and Acer for proliferation into international markets. Evergreen cargo and shipping for that matter, too. Try to think of a port anywhere in the world where you don’t see their containers.

I like Coco Lee.

Taiwan Beer, of course!

The Gay Panda courier company:

Makes my day every time I see one of their vans.

Seriously, these companies are excellent. Parcel delivery from one end of the country to the other within 24 hours for the price of a Big Mac meal.

And incidentally, on the subject of isotonic drinks … does anyone know what a Pocari is, and why I might want to drink its sweat? Come to think of it, I haven’t seen that brand for a while.

[quote=“citizen k”] I second IMEI; good ice cream!
[/quote]
I third Imei; good OJ. :thumbsup:

I disagree that 7-11 and other convenience stores are not excellent companies. While they do sell a lot of crap, they also sell a lot of good quality products: coffee, decent sandwiches, fruit, beer, and in many urban locations, very reasonably priced organic produce. Their services are fantastic: faxing, photocopying, wireless, parcel delivery and pickup, paying bills, and so on.

Otherwise, I like Giant, Cottonfields, Muji (Japanese but locally designed clothing), HTC, Rhino (decent outdoor equipment), Eslite, and many more I can’t recall.

Ah yes, Giant, but like Acer already out there.

I’d add Hey Song. If only because of this plug by Wu Bai.

It’s worth considering what brands are likely to make it in China also. Uni-President/7-11 have made big inroads, for example, as has Want Want.

HG

Mentioning a state company Taiwan’s Post Office is first class in my book! They are everywhere, really convenient but in a good way. Imei’s stuff just is a higher quality than what you will get at the 7-11s in general, then 7-11 own brand is the worst of all. You can tell that somebody in Imei reallly cares about their food quality. Taiwan draft beer in the green bottles is pretty passable, otherwise I would not lament their passing except that it is an iconic company in Taiwan. I love Sushi express…might not be for the purists but after having ‘real’ sushi forced down me in Korea/Japan I love coming back for their version of the stuff.
Datong is probably the most venerable of all Taiwanese manufacturing brands going back to Japanese colonial times and one of the multinationals to emerge from Taiwan, to this day Taiwanese love their rice cookers, they have their hands in everything but Datong hangs on mostly by it’s size and soft loans from banks and access to capital markets, much of the company is loss-making and it is run by different fiefdoms within the founding family (which is complicated as you can imagine with xiao lao pos included). An interesting thing about Datong is if you see that some of their branches sell liquor and wines, seemingly to do with the son-in-law of the chairman (who is a foreigner), so they sponsored him to get into the business. Datong also have their own university from which they like to train their staff in the ‘Datong’ way and with historic Japanese buildings well preserved on campus. From their property portfolio in Taipei they are unlikely to go broke anytime soon though.

As for ‘will be big in China’, Want Want and President are already doing well as HG mentioned. I think 85C will do very well over the next few years. Any good quality and historical Taiwanese food producer should have a chance to do well there, this is Taiwan’s ace in it’s sleeve…better quality food that fits with Chinese market especially growing middle classes and has a hint of exoticism (for them). I have a rough plan to do something similar as crazy as it sounds.

wantchinatimes.com/news-subc … 1109000117

This paper is owned by the Want Want group, it is very pro China probably due to their enormous success there, Want Want made so much money seilling instant noodles in China they bought a whole chunk of Taipei 101 recently.

I like HTC

Eslite (though I dont consider that a brand per se)

Evergreen is a good call - they are omnipresent

Me thinks that may be Japanese. :ponder: .[/quote]

me still thinks not. Pocari is Jap, Supau is made by Vitalon, which is of the ROC.

and from that, eventually came super Super Supau.

How it’s possible to complain about 7-11 and Family Mart is beyond me. I am in one or both of those pretty much every day.

Anyways… I like both EVA and China Airlines a lot. Also, 55688 cabs are always always (always!) nice.

D-i-n T-a-i F-u-n-g (Boycotting auto pinyin-ing) is like sex in your mouth

Also, I don’t know if this is really a valid response, but, since 7-11 has been brought up by the OP… The quality and constancy of the McDonalds food and decor in Taiwan is constantly top notch.

I stand corrected; thanks for that great story. Sometimes accidents are the mother of invention, lol.

[quote=“dnwolfgang”]D-i-n T-a-i F-u-n-g (Boycotting auto pinyin-ing) is like sex in your mouth
[/quote]
+1

Right now it’s got to be HTC. I love my new smartphone! HTC has developed a very good reputation in North America and Europe now too. Taiwan, jia yo!

[quote=“headhonchoII”]Mentioning a state company Taiwan’s Post Office is first class in my book! They are everywhere, really convenient but in a good way. Imei’s stuff just is a higher quality than what you will get at the 7-11s in general, then 7-11 own brand is the worst of all. You can tell that somebody in Imei reallly cares about their food quality. Taiwan draft beer in the green bottles is pretty passable, otherwise I would not lament their passing except that it is an iconic company in Taiwan. I love Sushi express…might not be for the purists but after having ‘real’ sushi forced down me in Korea/Japan I love coming back for their version of the stuff.
Datong is probably the most venerable of all Taiwanese manufacturing brands going back to Japanese colonial times and one of the multinationals to emerge from Taiwan, to this day Taiwanese love their rice cookers, they have their hands in everything but Datong hangs on mostly by it’s size and soft loans from banks and access to capital markets, much of the company is loss-making and it is run by different fiefdoms within the founding family (which is complicated as you can imagine with xiao lao pos included). An interesting thing about Datong is if you see that some of their branches sell liquor and wines, seemingly to do with the son-in-law of the chairman (who is a foreigner), so they sponsored him to get into the business. Datong also have their own university from which they like to train their staff in the ‘Datong’ way and with historic Japanese buildings well preserved on campus. From their property portfolio in Taipei they are unlikely to go broke anytime soon though.

As for ‘will be big in China’, Want Want and President are already doing well as HG mentioned. I think 85C will do very well over the next few years. Any good quality and historical Taiwanese food producer should have a chance to do well there, this is Taiwan’s ace in it’s sleeve…better quality food that fits with Chinese market especially growing middle classes and has a hint of exoticism (for them). I have a rough plan to do something similar as crazy as it sounds.

wantchinatimes.com/news-subc … 1109000117

This paper is owned by the Want Want group, it is very pro China probably due to their enormous success there, Want Want made so much money seilling instant noodles in China they bought a whole chunk of Taipei 101 recently.[/quote]

Not WantWant. WantWant got big making the japanese style rice snacks in China. The company that bought a big chunk of Taipei 101 is Master Kong. A couple of brothers from Tainan if I remember, went over to China in the early days and invested about 2 million nt dollars and started making the Master Kong instant noodles. They got so big they are US dollar billionaires now.

chinapost.com.tw/business/co … r-Kong.htm

Mr. Brown Coffee , Acer, HTC are my favourite taiwanese brands.

For foods, Imei and Ai-Zi-Wei.

http://www.apure.com.tw/

APure socks. A product that does what it says it does. Top-notch packaging and marketing, and excellent customer service. (My husband wore the same pair of socks for three days to see if they really wouldn’t get smelly, and they didn’t. We’ve ordered from them several times as they are now the only socks my son and husband will wear. And they are well-priced, too.)