Made-in-Taiwan Used to Mean PC, Now It’s 3D

With consumers and businesses switching to smartphones, the PC market that has long dominated Taiwan’s economy is shrinking, and companies such as Acer are struggling. Taiwan’s exports in March fell 11.4 percent, marking 14 consecutive months of declines for Made-in-Taiwan products. The economy shrank 0.6 percent in the first three months of 2016 from a year earlier, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists’ estimates, the third straight quarter of contraction.

Fear of being left behind is a strong motivator for New Kinpo Group Chief Executive Officer Simon Shen. The Taipei-based group last year sold about $7 billion worth of products ranging from electric pianos and pachinko displays to printers and TV set-top boxes. Kinpo also makes hard disk drives, routers, and other devices that link to PCs, leaving the group exposed to the computer industry’s decline. Finding the next big innovation to manufacture and export is an urgent task for Shen. “We need to try something new,” he says. “Otherwise the current product line eventually will be gone.”