Like financial institutions the world over, Taiwan’s banks are feeling the strains of the global recession. But this downturn is shaping up as a watershed event for Taiwan’s NT$30 trillion banking sector. Potential acquirers have plenty of reasons to take a close look. Regulators have made clear that they will direct local banks to merge. Multinational banks and some private equity firms are pondering their options to enter Taiwan, build on an existing position or. in some cases, withdraw. And just last month, the finance ministry eased rules that will allow Mainland financial institutions to acquire stakes in Taiwan’s state-owned banks.
Posted June 24, 2009

Taiwanese love mobile phones—after all, Taiwan was the first country in the world to have more subscribers than people—they just don’t love their mobile service provider as much. It’s true: despite all the efforts that the country’s top three mobile service providers put into wooing subscribers, mobile-phone users are not charmed. In fact, according to a recent Bain study of nearly 400 mobile-phone users in Taiwan, the more people visit their mobile company’s—Chunghwa Telecom, TaiwanMobile or Far EasTone—store, the less they care for their service provider. When asked how likely they were to recommend their mobile operator to a friend or family, in all three instances, more subscribers said they would not, compared to subscribers who were willing to put in a good word.
Posted June 11, 2009.

“The end is near!” That was the message top government expert Cao Jianhai delivered in April when he predicted that residential property prices in China will plunge by half in the next two years. He reasons that China’s recent run-up in housing—average prices have tripled over the past five years—is unsustainable given the huge volume of new apartments sitting empty throughout the country.
Posted June 8, 2009

On May 3, the finance ministers of the Asean Plus Three group—which consists of the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as well as China, Japan and South Korea—agreed in Bali on the governing mechanisms and implementation plan for the multilateralization of the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI). What at first might sound rather unspectacular is in fact a major milestone on the road toward East Asian financial and macroeconomic cooperation.
Posted June 2, 2009

Vietnam’s economic performance in the first quarter of this year suggests the country’s short-term risks are indeed on the downside. According to the Central Institute for Economic Management, a research arm of the Ministry of Planning and Investment, the GDP growth rate was 3.1% in the first quarter—the slowest pace in at least a decade. This was a significant fall from the 7.4% in the first quarter of 2008. Unfortunately for Vietnam, such downside may be just beginning. Because the country is more dependent on the global economy than 10 years ago, it is also more vulnerable to the global economic downturn.
Posted May 19, 2009

With the Chinese government announcing that it wants to become the world’s largest producer of electric cars in the next three years, some of the smartest minds in business—including Warren Buffet, the management teams of global majors like BMW and Toyota, and leading Chinese auto manufacturers like Chery Automobile and Geely Automobile—believe that the market for electric vehicles in China is about to take off. Yet, most manufacturers chasing this market don’t fully understand who the customer really is.
Posted April 20, 2009

Optimism for near-term China recovery, fueled by the widely reported $587 billion two-year stimulus package, is running high heading into the G-20 summit this week. Many countries are expecting Chinese demand to spur a new round of increased consumption. These hopes are unfortunately misplaced at the moment. The stimulus is neither large enough to stimulate demand lost from plummeting exports and declining investment, nor is it focused on addressing the concerns of the fragile middle class that might help China spend its way out of crisis.
Posted April 1, 2009

The media loves to harp on Japan's "lost decade" and use the world's second-largest economy as a negative example. Yet while corporations in other countries are still gaming the government for handouts and freebees, corporate Japan has learned that government actions tend to merely delay the inevitable. This time Japan Inc. is restructuring for real and a leaner, meaner Japan is poised to rise back to the top.
Posted March 26, 2009