China accepts Taiwanese enterprises into industry standards communities

This article was published by the Taiwan Headlines on May 12, 2006. It reports that China recently agreed to let Taiwanese enterprises join the China Communications Standards Association and Chinese Electronics Standardization Association, through Taiwan's private Sinocon Foundation. As a result, Taiwanese companies are now able to get involved in China's development of industry standards.

The China Communications Standards Association and the Chinese Electronics Standardization Association are non-profit organizations that develop industry standards and recommend them to the Chinese authorities.

The aforementioned decision was announced by China's Vice Minister for Information Industry during a recent forum held in Taipei. According to industry analysts, once Taiwanese enterprises entered the aforementioned Chinese associations, they would be able to directly shoot for the lucrative Chinese information-technology market. In 2005, China's IT industry had total revenue of 3.84 trillion RMB or Chinese yuan (US$480 billion).

According to this article, setting up industry standards for areas on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait will help both sides realize considerable savings on royalties charged by foreign format establishers. For example, China's IT industry currently pays tens of billions of Chinese yuan for royalties every year.

According to Taiwan's Sinocon Foundation, the IT industries on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait have played major parts in the world's IT supply chain. However, Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturers are not able to generate large profits from contract-manufacturing services. Worse, they are always faced with patent lawsuits. All of these issues demonstrate why cooperation between Taiwan and China on IT standards would offer the two sides more chances to create a lucrative supply chain. While China has a huge market, excellent research and development capability, and a competitive manufacturing environment, Taiwan has advantages in innovation, research and development, and manufacturing management.

The aforementioned technology-standardization forum attended by China's Vice Minister for Information Industry was organized by the Sinocon Foundation. More than 20 of Taiwan's high-tech enterprises also participated at the forum. Major topics on the forum's agenda included standards for China's third-generation (3G) TDS-CDMA mobile communications network, mobile storage, flat-panel displays, audio and video encoding, "green energy", and the semiconductor lighting industry.

In 2005, the Sinocon Foundation and its Chinese counterparts held their first summit in Beijing. The topics on that meeting's agenda included standards for TDS-CDMA cell phone networks, flat panel displays, mobile storage, and audio video encoding.