New energy, new opportunities
SME owners may need to update their thinking about employee training, but Hsin argues that staff training is always very tightly targeted-on developing new products, bringing in new technology, understanding new trends, retaining key staff, or preparing for an upcoming reorganization. "With the present outlook so uncertain, companies have no idea what kind of training to offer," says Hsin.
Firms and industries follow their own unique development tracks, and the differences among them can be tremendous. Many scholars nonetheless argue that a number of global trends are apparent. Firms that monitor new trends and seek appropriate niches in the value chain in new fields tend to have a better financial outlook than those that don't.
"Green" industries are now a major trend. In his first address to Congress, US President Obama on February 24 mentioned the need to develop wind and solar power, biofuels, clean coal, and highly efficient automobiles. In Taiwan, President Ma Ying-jeou acknowledged the importance of green energy in early March when he enumerated six major industries of the future-green energy, tourism, healthcare, biotechnology, cultural innovation, and precision agriculture.
San Gee, deputy minister of the Council for Economic Planning and Development, argues that green energy is the way of the future and that Taiwan needs to be a player in the field. With that in mind, the government will carefully evaluate our current resources, including things like wind speeds and our potential generating capacity, ocean temperature differentials, our solar power potential, and electric car technologies, to gain a better understanding of our strengths and limitations. It will then muster resources and offer guidance to the private sector.
We already have advantages in photovoltaics, for example. Taiwan produced nearly NT$100 billion worth of crystalline silicon solar cells in 2008, accounting for 16.7% of global production.
But Cyrus Chu, an academician in the Institute of Economics at the Academia Sinica, notes that Taiwanese production consists largely of individual cells. We sell few modules, which are assembled from the cells, and few systems, assembled from modules, on the international market. Putting large numbers of solar cells together into systems requires mastery of connection and transmission technologies. Taiwanese firms don't lack the technology, but they do lack experience in the meat-and-bones of contracting, building, and actually running these kinds of projects. As a result, they've had a hard time winning bids in the international marketplace.
Chu proposes allowing the industry to run trial projects on the wide-open, flat, sunny fields of Penghu to gain that experience. Moreover, if Penghu were ultimately to become a gambling destination, we could put solar power systems on the roofs and outer walls of the casinos as well, making them perhaps the world's only "green casinos."