Abstract
Abstract When people talk about the competitiveness of a country, we used to think that countries with advanced technology and powerful economic scale would certainly have excellent competitive strength. However, to take Sweden and Finland (in Northern Europe) for instance, though these two countries have relatively small economic scale, their competitive strength in certain industrial field (like communication industry) is not less than other great powers (like USA). Why these Northern European small countries overwhelm those great powers in those fields of industry? What factors should be re-considered? In 80’s, Michael Eugene Porter provided a concept of “the competitive advantage of nations” with a complete model and theory to figure out the reasons why a nation gains advantage over the other nation. The theory nowadays has developed evaluation criteria to not only qualitatively describe the factors of competitive advantage, but also quantify those factors. Therefore, we can find of the competitive advantage of a nation in a specific industrial field with relatively objective way. Recently, the liquid crystal panel industry plays an important role in the world-wide consuming market. Interesting point is the Asian countries including Taiwan, Japan and Korea have dominant influence in the liquid crystal industry, China is also running up. But there is rarely research to study the relative competitive advantage and supply chain arrangement among those countries in the liquid crystal industry. Among the competitors, Taiwan got higher evaluation than the China on factors of technique, production, administration, and government policy. And China has higher advantage on market than Taiwan. On the other hand, Taiwan has advantage over Japan on production and government policy; and gain advantage over Korea on market, production factor and government policy. In view of the regional economic cooperation, Taiwan and China have made the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), other countries would like to have strategic connecting with Taiwan for entering the Chinese market and global market. It can be expected that if the relationship between Taiwan and China keeps on improving stably, other Asian and Western countries will have less misgiving on the political issue of Taiwan. They can focus on the actual economic benefit produced by the trading and investing cooperation with Taiwan, then they may build up alliance with Taiwan to create win-win relationship. Taiwan and Japan have long-term cooperation relationship with mutual trust. For being partner of Japan, Taiwan has many advantages which can hardly be found in other countries like geographically close, multicultural, friendly people, convenient life, highly developed education, complete industrial supply chain and similar enterprise culture, etc. The competitiveness among Taiwan, Japan and China in the panel industry is studied by utilizing the “Five Forces” analysis basing on the characteristics of this field. The writer concludes and provides “Regional Alliance, Globally Overall Arrangement” strategy. The strategy aims to reinforce the interaction with Japan, and to strengthen the supply chain partnership. The short-term goal is to complement each other on industrial production, and to enhance the competitiveness advantage of Taiwan. The middle-tern goal is to joint research with Japan for technology upgrades. While the global management environment changing fast, and the global competition getting tougher, it is expected that this report can be not only reference for TFT LCD industry developing strategy, but also valuable for reinforcing the Taiwan-Japan cooperation, deepening Taiwan-Japan complement partnership of enterprises to enter, for example, the Chinese market by Taiwan –Japan strategic alliance. Therefore, Taiwan and Japan can work together to open up global market, to build up a mutually beneficial win-win model. Finally, the report provides the suggestions for accelerating the cooperation on key industries, expanding the range of the industrial cooperation, strengthening Taiwan-Japan business cooperation patterns, innovating industrial cooperation models and establishing system for pushing industrial cooperation.