Based on my experience of being in the export manufacturing industry here, I’d say there are loads of products that are manufactured in Taiwan and sold on the local market without being exported and “re-imported” first etc. etc… I’d hazard a guess and say 99% of the “it’s expensive because it has to be exported and re-imported” stories are flat out BS, at best a part truth but mostly just an excuse to “gouge” local consumers…
To some extent the reason some manufactured items are more expensive here than overseas is that any factory manufacturing their own brand of proprietary product that are large enough to have a significant percentage of their total sales market in export sales will be up against 100’s of other factories competing for those foreign orders… If you add to that the much greater competition in foreign retail market price points, most factories have no choice but to really cut close to the bottom line on their margins for these export orders… Usually that works out okay since conveniently, there are all kinds of government incentives, tax breaks, flexible bonded warehouse regulations etc. to bolster export manufacturing, which in the bigger picture, is the only trick Taiwanese big business ever learned… These big volume, bad price, orders are the bread and butter of most manufacturing companies in that they keep the overheads down, keep the assembly lines busy and at the end of the day they are on a small margin, but a margin none the less, so they’re profitable, but only if you have the volume, and you only get the volume with low FOB prices… cue catch 22 cycle that benefits uber consumer markets like the EU/USA… They also subsidize these “volume customers” with other more lucrative “cash cow” customers from other countries where either currency, import duty, GDP, or market demographics reasons make higher price points are acceptable eg. Scandinavia etc… Unfortunately for us, Taiwan, like Scandinavia etc. is on the list of countries that are used to foot the bill for the R&D and associated costs of any given product, whereas the export price points for the EU/US “volume orders” will be based purely on cost of manufacturing per unit…
For the Taiwan domestic market, they don’t have as much retail competition and also there is an “old boys club” (for want of a better term) unwritten agreement between manufacturers that ensures that nobody quotes too low so as to bring prices down across the board locally… Also for relatively newer, or high tech items like GPS, Garmin flat out rips off Taiwanese consumers by charging premium retail prices for outdated GPS models no longer sold in the EU/US since it is a new product with a certain “novelty” value and the Taiwanese market is not as savvy regarding what they are getting for their money… They pretty much charge US retail price from 5 years ago when it was a new model x 0.95 …
Lastly some brands/products being manufactured in Taiwan, particularly high tech products are purely OEM… That is the factory manufacturing the items has no proprietary or sales rights and so the ex-works unit price that the proprietary company in the US for example pays is nowhere near what the ex-works price a Taiwanese retailer would pay, given that they are merely a sales agent like any other for the US company’s proprietary products…
[EDIT: I’ve just re-read this post and I’d like to apologise to anyone unfortunate enough to have spent their valuable time reading it… what a boring load of crap that was… sheesh… 
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