By Michelle Hsu Founded in 1973, the Taiwan Furniture Manufacturers Association (TFMA) has witnessed Taiwan's furniture industry through its ups and downs. Today, the association faces new challenges in its mission to help local furniture makers adapt to changing business conditions and stay competitive. "With the furniture industry starting to revive from the downturn that started with...

By MICHELLE HSU The Taiwan International Cultural and Creative Industry Expo, organized by the Ministry of Culture since 2010, is now in its 4th iteration. During its short life the expo has strived to turn “creative ideas” into “commercial value” and play the role of a platform for communication between original creators and industry, making the abstract nature of culture more concrete and ex...

Exports of metal furniture from Taiwan have held steady despite market fluctuations, underscoring the global competitiveness of the domestic industry. Metal is more flexible than many other furniture materials, such as wood, rattan, glass, and plastics, making it well-suited to making furniture a variety of shapes. Metal parts are also commonly used to complement other materials in furniture....

While the global economic climate has improved a bit in 2013, China’s growth has remained sluggish. This weakness, coupled with the short-term impact of the government’s revision of regulations to cool off the overheated real estate market, has confronted China’s furniture manufacturers with declining sales and profits. The industry seems destined to either stagnate or shrink, and the result will...

China’s dining set industry has been developing smoothly in recent years, with most makers of outdoor furniture joining the line and adopting integrated manufacturing processes. Competition among manufacturers is now extremely fierce, and to remain in the global market suppliers need to find their own unique advantages. With improved living standard, people today demand higher quality in their...

Mostly clustered in Taiwan’s central counties of Taichung and Changhua, Taiwanese furniture parts makers saw their heyday as the island’s export-driven economy took off in the 1960s, with the prosperity being relatively fleeting as labor, land costs rose on the island, coupled with rivalry from emerging nations as China and SE Asia, to force many downstream suppliers to seek greener pasture offsh...

After undergoing transition in the late 1990s, the Taiwan furniture industry has awakened to a strategy taken for granted in the West and often practiced with considerable success, with an increasing number of companies learning the art of and investing in branding. This new trend started at the beginning of the 21st century and is marked by two mainstream styles—innovation and craftsmanship...

In a secluded hilly area of suburban Taipei, a retired professor has been staging his own version of upgrading and enlightenment of the furniture industry, with the Furniture Bibliotheca HDG, a private library in an isolated, decades-old traditional Chinese residence amid sylvan woods that is perhaps a 30-minute walk from its nearest neighbor. The abbreviation HDG is the Romanized acronym of thre...

Taiwan sorely lacks know-how to develop woodworking turnkey plants C.L. Tu, chairman of the Taiwan Woodworking Machinery Association (TWMA) and Cheng Kuang Wood Machinery Works Co., Ltd., gazes a video clip on his laptop of a German-made woodworking equipment that makes futuristic robotic machinery a reality, with the intelligent tool humming effortlessly to turn green logs into finished ...

Keeping an eye on stylish design helps one maker to be competitive Taiwan’s furniture industry was also shaken by the global downturn in 2009, turning out only US$1.359 billion of furniture and related products, compared with US$1.680 billion posted in 2008, according to statistics from the Taiwan Furniture Manufacturers’ Association. Despite the global economic recovery, the furniture hard...