Taiwan’s Smart Machinery Playing Key Roles in Post-Pandemic Smart Manufacturing Opportunities

The machinery industry is an important pillar of Taiwan’s economic development. In the past, highly competitive products that successfully shined in the global market were created through complete precision machinery clusters and the integration of upstream, midstream, and downstream resources.

Nowadays, Taiwan’s machinery industry utilizes the cloud, big data, IoT, smart robots, and other Industry 4.0 technologies to innovate and move towards intelligentization and digitalization.

Taiwan’s machinery industry consists mainly of small and medium-sized enterprises. Unlike the large-scale enterprises in advanced countries such as Germany and Japan, Taiwan takes on a special form; its companies use the power of clustering and integration to form an upstream and downstream supply chain that supports the industry closely to mitigate the competitiveness gap between individual companies.

Taiwan has upgraded from precision machinery to smart machinery, which is more flexible, pragmatic, and resilient. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan’s machine tool industry, which is regarded as the mother of machinery, has demonstrated strong integration and solidarity.

Faced with the need to producehuge quantities of face masks for the national population, the industry, legal bodies, and the government formed a national face mask team that built 92 face mask production lines in just over a month, increasing the daily mask output ten-fold from 1.88 million to 18 million.

Almost overnight, Taiwan went from relying on imports for 90% of its face masks to becoming the world’s second-largest mask-producing country. Foreign countries were highly impressed with this achievement, which once again shined a light on Taiwan’s reputation as a large precision machinery manufacturing nation.

As the epidemic has slowed down, manufacturing industries in various regions around the globe have also gradually recovered. With the support of strong information and communication backgrounds, as well as precision machinery technology, Taiwan’s smart machinery products have received much recognition.

Taiwan Excellence award-winning machinery manufacturers AccuteX and Aurotekare prime examples, as they have helped clients in unmanned processing, product line optimization and Industry 4.0 upgrades in industrial manufacturing, which is expected to provide innovative technologies and solutions in the post-epidemic smart manufacturing era.

AccuteX is a leader in EDM machines which focuses on the Industry 4.0 machining field. In addition to being recognized by the Taiwan Excellence Award, AccuteX also won the National Quality Award, the 21st National Award for Outstanding SMEs, the 3rd Taiwan Mittelstand Award, and the 14th Rising Star Award.

AccuteXconsistently moves ahead and masters key technologies at the same time. The company is committed to developing high-precision and cost-effective models.

Its High Efficiency Linear Motor Wire Cut EDM, which won the Taiwan Excellence award in 2019, integrates the functions of automated scrap removal and automated template correction without human intervention, realizing the unmanned processing of wire cutting machines.

Aurotek, which started out in import trading, has transitioned from being a product agent to entering the industrial robots industry to LED and semiconductor process equipment production. Over the years, it has developed excellent production technology, learned to accurately understand market demand, and satisfy customers with customized products.

The company sells under its own brand, Aurotek, on the global market. From 1998 to 2020, a total of 33 products developed by Aurotek won the Taiwan Excellence Award, six of which won the highest gold and silver awards (one gold and five silver).

In 2019, the export value of Taiwan’s machinery industry reached US$27.8 billion. Although the US-China trade war and COVID-19 have impacted the Taiwan machinery industry in the short term, driven by the dual engine of smart machinery and smart manufacturing in combination with Taiwan’s existing ICT technology advantage, it is believed that Taiwan’s manufacturing industry will have the opportunity to bring higher value and benefits to global production in the near future.

The stable demand for smart machinery in numerous global industries will still be there post pandemic. Thus, the future is bound to be bright for Taiwanese companies that respond rapidly and flexibly to the ever-changing global economic conditions.