The News Lens
Date: 2016/10/11
By: Philip Liu

The Tsai Ing-wen government has included this sector among its five priority industries.

Photo Credit: AP/達志影像

To meet the growing global demand for smart automated manufacturing equipment in line with what has been dubbed “Industry 4.0,” Taiwan’s machinery companies are scrambling to turn out smart models by incorporating advanced information technology into their products. The outlook for the industry appears so promising that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has included smart machinery as one of the five innovative industrial categories – the others are green energy, biotech, defense technology, and the Internet of Things (IoT) – earmarked for priority development by the new administration.

Taiwan is considered to have a good prospects for developing the smart machinery sector because of its existing strong foundation in the machine-tool industry, situated mainly in central Taiwan in and around the city of Taichung. According to Taiwan’s Topology Research Institute, Taiwan last year ranked as the world’s seventh largest producer of machine tools and fifth largest exporter. In addition, Taiwan has made strides in technologies important to smart machinery, such as cloud computing, big data, IoT, and smart robots.    [FULL  STORY]