ABSTRACT
The information and communications technology (ICT) industry has been considered to be a sector of landmark underlying the success of Taiwan's export-led industrialization and cluster-based development. Taiwan has been widely regarded as one of the major players in the ICT industry and quite a number of Taiwanese-made products, though not necessarily made in Taiwan, within the ICT subsectors, such as motherboards, scanners, monitors, notebook computers, personal computers, integrated circuits (ICs), and liquid crystal display (LCD) panels enjoy significant global market shares. What underlies this are the well-regarded production and design capabilities of the Taiwanese ICT producers, which, in turn, have made Taiwan a major source of original equipment manufacturing (OEM)/original design manufacturing (ODM) contract work for prominent, international ICT brand marketers, with the few exceptions of HTC Corporation, Acer, Inc., and ASUS. Due to intensified price competition and a trend of “razor-thin profits,” a central issue regarding the industrial upgrading of the Taiwanese ICT industry has surrounded the debate on branding versus OEM/ODM manufacturing (Chen et al. 2006; Chu 2009). However, changes in ground realities have brought about a new issue to the sector's industrial upgrading, which arguably has much to do with the servitization of ICT manufacturing.
