A Taiwanese manufacturer of hybrid-car parts faces risks to its proprietary technology in its partnership with a Chinese automaker. Case Study authored by Willy C. Shih and Jyun-Cheng Wang, featuring commentaries by experts Eric Giler and Mats H. Olsson.

A Taiwanese manufacturer of hybrid-car parts faces risks to its proprietary technology in its partnership with a Chinese automaker. Case Study authored by Willy C. Shih and Jyun-Cheng Wang, featuring commentaries by experts Eric Giler and Mats H. Olsson.

A Taiwanese manufacturer of hybrid-car parts faces risks to its proprietary technology in its partnership with a Chinese automaker. Case Study authored by Willy C. Shih and Jyun-Cheng Wang, featuring commentaries by experts Eric Giler and Mats H. Olsson.

As an original design manufacturer (ODM) of television sets and leading supplier to Vizio, a market leader in the U.S. for LCD flat panel TVs, AmTran Technology Ltd. uses what founder Alpha Wu describes as a "WE" model in which western companies perform sales, marketing, and product definition work, while eastern companies in Asia like his perform the engineering and manufacturing work. Confronted with commoditization pressure, Wu is presented with the opportunity to license a major TV brand. Is this consistent with his model? The case explores the changes that have taken place in the consumer television receiver market and the challenges faced by leaders of the analog market like Sony. It is intended for use with the technical note, "Competency-destroying Technology Transitions: Why the Transition to Digital is Particularly Challenging," HBS No. 613-024.

Days after Jerry Shen introduced a new tablet computer at the Consumer Electronics Show, a Google meeting convinced him to go with a lower price point and co-branding as the Nexus 7. While his company would have a premier position at launch, companies like Samsung posed a large competitive threat. He also knew he would sell more of the Android-powered tablets at the lower price, but how would he make money? The case explores the challenges of innovating in the Android value network in which firms specialized in only one part of the value chain, yet collectively they had to compete with a more vertically integrated Apple and its iPad. The case is intended to be part of a discussion on modularity and industry structure.

Barry Lam, the CEO and Founder of Quanta Computer (the largest notebook computer manufacturer worldwide), has recognized for many years, that he had to transform the company to decrease its dependence on producing commodity hardware for other global brands and move the firm into areas of higher value-added products and services. But how could he transform an organization that was rooted in low cost manufacturing and supply chain management into one that creates innovative new products and commands premium prices? The existing organization was built to operate in a highly constrained innovation space, and the internal resistance to change often seemed insurmountable. Meanwhile, the firm had to continue delivering predictable revenues. Lam launched the Quanta Research Institute (QRI), a targeted effort to foster industrial research as a vehicle for organizational transformation and to build differentiation in a commodity world. The case examines how QRI sources ideas, and discusses how Quanta will use China as a test market for new products and services.

Delta Electronics, the world's largest manufacturer of switching power supplies, hoped to enter the market for gasoline-electric hybrid power trains for automobiles by being a major component and subsystem supplier. While most public awareness of hybrid vehicles fell to the tier one integrated vehicle manufacturers, Delta felt it had an opportunity to enter the market via new automotive market entrants in China who had comparatively fewer capabilities and were willing to purchase major subsystems. Yet the company faced a dilemma -- a major customer wanted Delta to transfer ownership of key intellectual property as a condition of doing business. The case affords students an opportunity to consider whether a technological shift will enable what seems traditionally to be a highly integrated product designs to shift to a modular architecture, and consider the implications for appropriability of returns.

The term "White Box" is often used to describe products without a brand name. Such products are assembled from standardized parts, and they became a very popular category of desktop PCs. Hsinchu, Taiwan based MediaTek is a fabless semiconductor company that unleashed a white box market in mobile phone handsets by offering an innovative "complete solution" for 2.5G and 2.7G handset manufacturers, dramatically lowering the barriers to entry into the business. Besides enabling many Chinese branded manufacturers to enter the business, the grey market in components unleashed a complementary market of "Shanzhai" makers. Together these firms captured a significant fraction of the China market, as well as exports (both legal and grey) to 102 countries. CEO Ming-Kai Tsai is faced with the question of the best growth path. While multiple tier one handset makers are dismissive of MediaTek, perhaps because of its role in enabling the Shanzhai, the company's offerings have enabled an "army of ants" to challenge the leaders. Can MediaTek move up-market to sell its chipsets to the likes of Nokia? Under what terms?

Few CEOs successfully manage the evolution of their companies from OEM outsourcer to branded manufacturer to expert consumer marketer as well as Tony Lo, CEO of Giant Manufacturing Co. Ltd., now the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world. In the mid-1980s, Giant produced over a million bikes per year with the Giant brand on fewer than 15% of them; by 2008, Giant was producing 6.4 million bicycles with 70% carrying the Giant brand. And in 2010, the transition was still in-process as CEO Lo experimented with a new business model for women cyclists in Taiwan and globally--leveraging some of Giant's lessons learned and challenging others. The case explores Giant's historical evolution from OEM outsourcer to branded manufacturer, which relied heavily on Giant's forward integration into the construction of a world-class, global retail organization. Giant's ability to understand the customer and move him/her up-market has driven both sales growth and profitability (e.g., average sales prices in 2006, 2007, and 2008 were $325, $345, and $360 respectively). That sets the stage for Lo's latest challenge: a realization that his products were not meeting the needs of women customers (including particularly his wife). As a result, Lo commissioned his CFO Bonnie Tu to open the first all-women's bicycle store in Taipei (owned by corporate, not the traditional retail organization), and charged her not only with figuring out the needs of women customers, but also mandating that she turn a profit. "Because your only customers are women, if you don't know how to sell to them, you're out of business -period. So you experiment for survival," explained Lo. The case concludes by examining the company's continuing integration into retail stores, looking closely at the Liv/giant pilot and the surprising business model that it developed.

The government-led creation and incubation of the semiconductor industry in Taiwan is a striking success for advocates of strong industrial policy. It has led to the island nation's domination of the global "foundry" business in which firms like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) manufacture the designs of "fabless" design companies. The two have a combined global market share of close to 70% of this global business segment. This success was all the more striking because when the initiative began, the country had few of the large scale firms that could support the R&D and scale necessary to enter such sophisticated capital intensive industries. There were no firms with the deep technological roots or the skill base to even begin. Yet government planners recognized the challenges of upgrading the nation's technology base and formulated a strategy that entailed the creation of "pilot agencies" that would serve as vehicles to bridge between sources of leading edge technology (predominantly sourced from overseas) and the commercialization to be carried out by local firms.

Chi Mei is a Taiwanese industrial group that makes a major diversification into the technology intensive TFT-LCD flat panel display industry. Because the diversification is far away from its core competence in petrochemicals, it is an opportunity to examine how the firm was able to become a global leader in the relatively short span of ten years. Such organic diversifications are relatively unusual by Western standards, especially into technologies and markets that have relatively high entry barriers and where there is no deep rooted national technological or scientific foundation. As such Chi Mei is an interesting vehicle to examine the rise of a major Asian industrial cluster with global scope which has no participants or competitors in the West. The case can also be used to expose students to the global supply chain for key information technology components. Taiwan and Korea are today the major world centers for the manufacture of semiconductors (in particular DRAMs and FLASH memory) and flat panel displays. Taiwan is also the center for notebook computer manufacturing, and Taiwanese companies, through their China-based manufacturing and assembly operations, drive 60% of the IT exports from China. Yet few students even know the identity of these major global players. Taiwan and Korea based TFT-LCD flat panels are the critical components in notebook computers, computer monitors, and flat panel televisions from essentially all well known global brands.