Taiwan Fastener Industry
2008-08-01

Even fastener can be hardly related to high technology industries but it has been a critical and essential part of machinery, construction, civil engineering, electrical, automotive and electronic industries. The more a country is industrialized the more fastener is applied. So the USA has been the most important market for Taiwan Fasteners. The export volume increased to 630, 000 tons for 1999 from 250,000 tons for 1990. The growth was more than 2.5 times. Even though export percentage declined during the years the volume was still going up. The fact showed the exporters had succeeded market transfer. Europe is the second biggest market for Taiwan fasteners. By the efforts of the exporters in the last 10 years the export volume has gone up to 260,000 tons for 1999 from 60,000 tons 1990. Export proportion increased from 15% to 23%.
Driven by shifting external environments, the fastener industry in Taiwan, the renowned “Kingdom of Bolts and Nuts”, has to move to the production of high value-added fasteners. Auto fastener, which comprises 40% of all fasteners used globally, is just one of
the major high value-added products. As auto parts are highly related to human safety with most strict quality requirement, auto fastener usually belongs to the high price product. Taiwan’s fastener industry, avoid being attacked front and rear, has started to transfer production from standard fastener to auto fastener four or five years ago, but fallen short of a successful across-the-board transition. A few successful fastener producers on an adequate scale include SANSHING FASTECH Corp., CHU HUA Industrial Co., YING MING Industrial Co., BOLTUN Corp. and etc. The subject of this paper is to identify the problems confronted by the industry in transition, whether upgrading needs to tackle very high threshold or the post-transition will lose competitiveness so how.
The paper is to study the competing strategies of auto fastener industry in Taiwan through in-depth interview with professionals, academics, entrepreneurs and employees of the industrial to collect their viewpoints and experiences. Mode 1: Self-Support

In recent years, that the increase of national brand machines and automobiles has brought in many opportunities for fastener enterprises that specialize in providing fitting. It seems that offering fitting is the easiest way to export. Under such circumstances, fastener enterprises have to keep close strategic partnership with machine and automotive enterprises, as well as to get full understanding of foreign market, which becomes the unneglectable problems for fastener enterprises. After-sales service has been attached great importance in many fastener enterprises.

Although there is great difficulty, this trend has been kept increasing in the recent years. Different enterprises choose different ways according to their own conditions: Some target foreign after-sales market in the way of exhibition; some actively visit foreign enterprises to get the fitting chance; some firstly open the after-sales market and then enter the fitting market.

Self-support export enterprises should have a certain human resources, material and wealth support. Some large-scale fastener enterprises and local fastener association jointly build a professional foreign sales team to go deep into the foreign enterprises and to carry out marketing and after-sales service with the help of the local resources. Though it cost too much, the effect is very good.



Many fastener enterprises are seeking for foreign export. Particularly, when occupying the foreign after-sales market, they could carry on by agents. Some are willing to choose foreign agents, but most of the enterprises prefer domestic agents. The agents have abundant experience, so that a platform for fastener export could be well established. As the number of the agents increases, some agents, from home and abroad, cheat the domestic fastener enterprises, which cause domestic fastener enterprises' dramatic loss. Some agents represent products from different enterprises and sell the products with low price in foreign exhibition, which harms the image of China fastener enterprises and damages their development in foreign market. We should pay full attention to EU’s antidumping against our products. Therefore, fastener enterprises have to examine carefully when choosing professional agents.