UNI Strategic News in Taiwan

The Former USA President, Mr Bill Clinton paid a visit to Taiwan over the weekend, but it was not on government business. A Singapore company organized the trip.
Universal Network Intelligence (UNI Strategic ) brought in the former US president to give a lecture on global warming and social inequality.
The Singapore events and conference organiser is one of a growing number of foreign companies that are cashing in on a resurgence in Taiwan’s popularity over the past two years that has been driven by a dramatic improvement in Taipei’s relations with China.
In fact, 20 companies from Singapore, China, Hong Kong and elsewhere have made secondary listings on the Taiwan stock exchange since last year, raising NT$40 billion (S$1.7 billion) in capital.
Fifteen companies, led by Microsoft and HP, have applied to set up research and development centres in Taiwan this year. That is the most since a government scheme to attract such investments began in 2002.
Singapore’s UNI Strategic is a good example of the kind of success businesses are enjoying here. Its CEO and founder, Mr Roger Tie, said the eight-year-old firm had a turnover of $12 million last year and expects $15 million this year.
UNI Strategic spent two months working to clinch the Clinton engagement, going through the US State Department and the former president’s own office.
Mr Tie said he hoped the widely reported event - Mr Clinton’s sixth trip to Taiwan in 31 years - would help raise UNI Strategic’s profile in Taiwan, where it has just opened an office, and perhaps in mainland China too. Its hard work paid off in a 19-hour visit by the former US president on Sunday.
‘We hope to organise more high-profile events in Taiwan, including one involving Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew because so many people here - officials, businessmen - have urged us to do it,’ Mr Tie said. He said preparations were in progress, but declined to give more details.
Taipei, meanwhile, is basking in the renewed foreign interest, and has built new air links with Tokyo and Seoul.
Recently, the European Parliament also voted overwhelmingly to grant Taiwanese visa-free travel in 28 European nations, even though none of them recognises Taiwan as a sovereign country.
That is a far cry from Taiwan’s years of international isolation under the administration of pro-independence president Chen Shui-bian, who ruled from 2000 to 2008, before Mr Ma Ying-jeou took power and engineered a detente with Beijing.
Take the influx of foreign entrants to the stock exchange.
Before 2009, only four foreign companies issued Taiwan Depository Receipts (TDR), which are certificates that confer a number of shares in a non- Taiwan-based company.
Now, the likes of Yangzijiang Shipbuilding, China’s largest privately owned ship builder which is listed in Singapore, and United Envirotech, a Singapore water treatment company, have all jumped on the TDR bandwagon.
Chinese companies that are not listed on the mainland are allowed to offer TDRs.
At the launch of Yangzijiang’s TDR in September, company executive chairman Ren Yuanlin was quoted as saying that the listing would help the company build recognition in Taiwan’s shipping market and enhance cooperation between the shipbuilding industries in China and Taiwan.
Next Wednesday, the Taiwan exchange will welcome its latest and biggest TDR player so far this year, Hong Kong-listed Digital China Holdings. The largest integrated IT service provider in the Greater China region expects to raise NT$7.85 billion.
Taiwan’s technology sector is also enjoying a boom. Belgian microelectronics company IMEC, for example, is setting up its first R&D centre outside of Europe in Taiwan.
An official with the Economic Affairs Ministry’s Department of Industrial Technology told The Straits Times that this year’s rash of new R&D centres are probably a by-product of the cross-strait free trade deal signed in June. There are now a total of 46 facilities.
The official, who declined to be named, said: ‘Since then, many companies Taiwan had previously wooed have expressed interest in establishing an R&D presence here, citing the improvement in cross-strait relations.’
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