Winds of Entrepreneurship SIngapore&Taiwan

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on November 9, 2003

As promised I would like to continue my series "Winds of entrepreneurship", covering Singapore and Taiwan this time.

Singapore and Taiwan have been hotspots of economic development in the last decades. Driven by the growing interest of investors in the region and the lack of stability in mainland China before 1990, both countries received major shares of FDI.

SingaporeSingapore was a long time unique in the region. Excellent political stability, abundance of English speaking residents, efficient authorities combined with a forward looking economic policy have created a small, but economical powerful country at the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula. As much Singapore was the favorable spot to locate the Asian headquarter for many overseas MNCs, the entrepreneurial activity has been lacking behind.

entrepreneurship

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor ranks Singapore's overall Total Entrepreneurship Activity at the 19th place behind Korea and China, but before Taiwan and Hong Kong. Singapore has an above average environment for entrepreneurs. The government support for fostering entrepreneurship is excellent. Several organizations like Project Senso are organized to help future entrepreneurs. To make the support for would-be-entrepreneurs complete, there are some working Business Angel Networks in the region. Here is an interesting list of regional entrepreneurs and leaders.

The VC market
By the middle of 2002, there were about 150 fund management companies in Singapore managing $16 billion worth of venture capital funds. That is a slight increase from the 144 firms with $15.2 billion at the end of 2002. $226.9 million was invested in Singapore based ventures.

Another study found that since the very beginning more than 700 companies have received funding of some kind from VCs. This compares well with Israel - another small nation known to be a hotbed of innovation - where more than 800 firms have venture capital backing. This overview gives some more insight of the volume of private equity funds in Singapore.

The VC market itself is growing and Singapore is discovering the advantages of a vibrant startup community. Singapore has been chosen by numerous VC companies as a regional headquarter.

Here is a good filled directory of VCs in the area. Also the Singapore Venture Capital and Private Equity Association helps to find the right contacts.

TaiwanStartups have played an important role in the economic development in Taiwan in the last decade. "High-tech" mostly stands for hardware related solutions in this country. Taiwan has so far been only on the sideways for most internationally active VC companies. Alas, the Taiwan Venture Capital Association has just a scarcity of information available.

Rong-I Wu, President of the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research, analyses in an interesting paper about Entrepreneurship in Taiwan the success story of SME's and startups in Taiwan.

My small research just revealed one interesting investment recently Esfia; local a developer of RISC technology that got $ 2 million of funding.