By Roger Liao, Vice President of TEEMA
Foreword：Chairman Richard Lee Sincerely Thanks the "2022 TEEMA Delegation to the US and Mexico"
The Taiwan Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association (TEEMA), in cooperation with the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), organized the "2022 TEEMA Delegation to the US and Mexico" in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Commerce's "Select USA" Investment Summit which was held in National Harbor, Maryland from June 26-29, 2022. We arranged three thematic sub-tours according to the needs of our members: the electric vehicle (EV) tour, the SelectUSA investment summit tour and the US-Mexico border tour. The "2022 TEEMA Delegation to the US and Mexico" was led by Yuan Chun-tang, the Chairman of Pacific Electric Wire & Cable Co., Ltd. In particular, TEEMA policy advisor Christina Liu, who was also a director of Hon Hai, was invited to take the EV delegation to Michigan and Ohio to visit the EV industry clusters and the Lordstown Motors EV factory in Ohio which Hon Hai had just acquired. The delegation consisted of 57 representatives from our member companies such as Hon Hai, PEWC, Inventec, Wistron, TECO, Acbel Polytech, Lite-On, Everlight Electronics and Newdigi Tech.
The trip was so productive, and I would like to represent TEEMA and sincerely thank the delegation leader Yuan Chuntang and the TEEMA policy advisor Christina Liu for their hard work under the pandemic. They led the delegations to meet with dignitaries in Washington, D.C. and other states to speak out for Taiwan, and led delegation members to participate in exchange meetings and forums to acquire business opportunities for our member companies.
I would also like to express our sincere appreciation to our Ambassador to the US Hsiao Bi-khim, Ambassador to Mexico Cheng Cheng-yung and Director Johnson Chiang of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago for their great assistance and delicate services to the "2022 TEEMA Delegation to the US and Mexico."
Special thanks should be given to the team led by AIT Director Sandra Oudkirk and Commercial Section Chief Brent Omdahl for taking the trouble to help arrange the delegations’ itinerary to strengthen the confidence of our members in investing in the United States.I would like to express our special thanks to our advisor, Albert Chen, Vice President Roger Liao and Poject Manager Francisco Yeh for their participation in the full process and service provided to the delegation, which helped the delegation to complete its mission.
History of the Select USA Investment Summit
The Select USA Investment Summit was initiated by then US president Barack Obama in June 2011 to promote foreign direct investment and job creation in the country, and in 2013 the government budgeted US$13 million for the first time. The annual summit is the most important investment promotion event in the U.S., bringing together worldwide enterprises and the Economic Development Organization (EDO) through the U.S. Department of Commerce, which mobilizes embassies around the world. The U.S. is an important economic and trade partner of our country. In order to demonstrate the value we placed on our economic and trade relations with the U.S. and to fulfill the need from our industries for becoming more close to and familiar with the U.S. market, our government sent Vincent C. Siew (Wan-chang Siew), the Former Vice President, to lead the delegation composed of business leaders to participate in the first Select USA event with a delegation. The second edition was held in 2015, with 65 companies and 88 senior executives from Taiwan attending, making it the second largest delegation among the 75 participating countries in the world, second only to China. That year, Taiwan moved up two notches from being the US’ 12th largest trading partner to the 10th.
Following a rotation of the ruling party, President Tsai Ing-wen in 2017 appointed national policy advisor Ho Meiyueh to lead business leaders to attend the Select USA event in Washington, D.C., and to inspect the investment environment for petrochemicals, steel, semiconductors, and smart machinery. Since then, US President Donald Trump took office, the Chinese delegation had not partaken in the forum in the wake of the US-China trade dispute and a policy of bringing manufacturing back to the US. Since 2018, the Taiwan delegation has been led by Minister Without Portfolio John Deng and the delegation of business leaders has been scaled up for the Select USA investment summit, with its size surpassing 100 members, making it the largest delegation of any country. In 2019, TEEMA Chairman Richard Lee, together with director Nicky Lu, director Yuan Chun-tang and supervisor Frank Ko, participated in the summit. With the assistance of the AIT Commercial Section, we arranged for our member companies to visit Stanford University and Plug & Play, a Silicon Valley start-up accelerator, as well as CISCO and TESLA for business meetings and factory visits, which yielded fruitful results. In 2020, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19, pandemic, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that the summit would be postponed until 2021 and held in an online forum format. The Association actively contributed to AIT's efforts to invite Taiwanese EV and sustainable energy suppliers to attend the summit, with 220 representatives from 153 companies participating online. The Select USA event in 2022 was held in a physical format in Maryland, US, from June 26th to 29th, and attended by Taiwan's delegation, headed by National Development Council (NDC) Minister Kung Minghsin, comprising 265 members from the semiconductor, biomedical, EV, 5G communications, low-earth orbit satellite industries and new ventures. Taiwan's delegation was the largest to the summit for the fourth consecutive year.
TEEMA reinforces links to the US
From 2019 onwards, in a bid to assist members to enhance the resilience of the industry supply chain and meet the needs of international expansion, TEEMA Chairman Richard Lee has been actively engaging with representatives from various countries in Taiwan and organizing the TEEMA Global Networking Forum every year to step up communication with officials in charge of trade and investment from major countries around the world and furnish members with information on their global investment plans. For the networking with the US, the Association has strengthened its ties with the AIT officials by remaining on good terms with former AIT director William Brent Christensen, current director Sandra Oudkirk and the AIT Commercial Section team, while actively assisting members to take part in the Select USA Investment Summit. In addition, we have engaged in a variety of interactive activities with the US government agencies arranged by the Executive Yuan's Office of Trade Negotiations and the inistry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), including receiving officials from the State Department, Department of Commerce, Department of the Treasury, Environmental Protection Agency, etc. for visits or holding videoconferences to make our members' voices heard and aid the government with civic diplomacy. This year, we teamed up with the AIT to organize a TEEMA delegation to the US and Mexico from June 18 to July 2. We offered three thematic itineraries depending on the needs of our members: first, we invited EV industrial players to attend the "Select USA" EV spin-off event by visiting the EV clusters in Michigan and Ohio from June 18 through 24; second, we scheduled a trip to the main forum of the Select USA Investment Summit in Maryland and Washington, D.C. from June 25 to 29 to learn about the investment incentives offered by the central and state governments of the US; and third, we arranged for members to visit the industrial areas in El Paso, Texas, New Mexico and Chihuahua, Mexico from June 30 to July 1 to gain an understanding of the investment environment along the US-Mexico border by calling on local successful Taiwanese businessmen there. TEEMA Chairman Richard Lee invited director Yuan Chun-tang to be the leader of the delegation. The members of the delegation included TEEMA policy advisor Christina Liu, director pollo Weng, advisor Albert Chen and 57 representatives from our member companies such as Hon Hai, PEWC, Inventec, Wistron, TECO, Acbel Polytech, Lite-On, Everlight Electronics and Newdigi Tech.
Select USA Tech Program
It is worth noting that the Select USA Tech Program, a new competition to attract global start-ups to the US market, was introduced at the Select USA Investment Summit in 2020. This year's SelectUSA Tech Program features seven industry segments, including Cleantech, CyberSecurity, eCommerce + Retail, FinTech, MedTech, Software and others. Taiwan's start-up team won the Select USA Tech Program in the areas of MedTech and CyberSecurity. The award in the MedTech category went to Astron MedTech, an incubatee of the MOEA Small and Medium Enterprise Administration-sponsored Taiwan Accelerator Plus (TAcc+) program, while that in the CyberSecurity category went to Lydsec Digital Technology. The performance of Taiwan's start-up delegation was impressive, with two of the 14 start-up companies taking part in the competition winning the title.
TEEMA as a liaison between the government and the private sector, a promoter based in Taiwan and a supporter of global operations
At this year's Select USA Investment Summit, TEEMA assisted its member companies to participate in the three thematic events mentioned above, and Yuan Chun-tang, the Association's delegation leader, was invited by John Chen-Chung Deng, the Chief Negotiation Representative of the Executive Yuan's Office of Trade Negotiations to join a highranking business leaders' delegation held in Washington, D.C. from the 26th to the 28th of June to give a voice to the U.S. government agencies from Taiwan's industrial sector. During a meeting with Michael Kaplan, Acting Assistant Secretary for International Affairs at the Treasury Department, Yuan said that the US has signed avoidance of double taxation agreements with major countries, and that Canada and Mexico, both signatories to the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), have entered into an agreement for the avoidance of double taxation with Taiwan, calling on Taiwan and the US to conclude an accord to avoid double taxation in the shortest possible time, so as to facilitate investment projects by businesses in both countries. Yuan also established contact with Arun Venkataraman, Assistant Secretary of Commerce, who said that Taiwan had become the eighth largest trading partner of the US and he was looking forward to Taiwan companies investing in the US and that the Department of Commerce would render necessary assistance to our businesses through its EDOs in various states.
The delegation leader Yuan Chun-tang, advisor Albert Chen and 20 companies were invited to attend the US Department of Energy's (DOE) EV policy briefing. The speaker was Bradford Simmons, director of international affairs at the DOE, who explained the US EV policy, the battery supply chain and disclosing the information that the federal government was currently providing $7.5 billion in subsidies for the states to apply to install charging piles, which is a boon to our charging pile industry.
Representative to the US Hsiao Bi-khim said to the delegation that the Taiwan and US governments have recently set up a number of platforms to strengthen Taiwan-US relations, including the Technology Trade and Investment Collaboration Framework (TTIC) and the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade, in the hope that the government and the private sector can work together to strengthen the relationship between Taiwan and the US and the economic, trade and investment cooperation between the two sides to create a win-win situation. TEEMA strives to act as a liaison between the government and the private sector, a promoter based in Taiwan and a supporter of global operations in order to assist members with sustainability and to create added value for members, as well as to establish a bridge between member companies and the governments at home and abroad and to assist members in their presence on the global market. TEEMA's industries are the major driving for economic growth in our country. The Association unites the strengths of the industrial sectors to provide advice to our government in a timely manner and is committed to acting as a backup force for our government's economic and trade negotiations with foreign counterparts all over the world.
