Vietnam has joined the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) and RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), and has signed FTAs (free-trade agreements) with the EU and the UK. These deals have positioned Vietnam as a preferred location for manufacturers seeking to disperse their capacity deployments amid the US-China trade disputes.

Fractus Antennas, formed by engineers who invented the technology allowing smartphone antennas to automatically switch between different bandwidth networks and launched mini-antennas for the Internet of Things (IoT) era, has recently rebranded itself as Ignion.

How much should one pay for a chip or a component? Lytica, a Canadian supply-chain pricing analytics company, has the answer. Founded by former Nortel chief procurement officer Ken Bradley, who, like many others in the IT industry, was once bemused by component pricing, Lytica is transforming itself into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, helping OEM and EMS make well-informed deals when buying or selling.

Canada is the fourth largest vehicle exporting country in the world, making 2.1 million cars a year. And the country is keen to take its car industry to a new level. Last year, Canada's Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association (APMA) launched Project Arrow - an initiative for developing electric vehicles (EV).

As electrification becomes a clear trend for future cars, solutions for infrastructure, power supply and batteries are very much in need to develop a sound and sustainable ecosystem in line with such a trend. Propulsion Quebec is an NPO created to support the ecological transition of transportation by enhancing the collaborative efforts of the industry.

Pandemic-driven demand for notebooks supporting remote work and study has brought explosive growths in orders for CPUs, power management ICs (PMIC), display driver ICs (DDI), and interface chips, with many IC distributors, including Edom Technology, also benefiting significantly with record revenues for 2020.

Compound semiconductor catches global market attention with rapidly advancing 5G and Wi-Fi communication technologies and rising IoT trends. Following first-generation semiconductor materials including silicon (Si) and germanium (Ge) and second-generation compound semiconductor materials including gallium arsenide (GaAs) and indium phosphide (InP), third-generation compound semiconductor materials including gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) featuring high power density are taking center stage.

The Canadian Trade Office in Taipei is endeavoring to accelerate collaboration between Canadian startups and Taiwanese companies. Canada's AI strength and car-manufacturing prowess and Taiwan's competitiveness in ICT hardware manufacturing are complementary and have great potential to create synergies.

Window of opportunity has opened up for Polish startup IS-Wireless, which was nominated for DigitalEurope's Future Unicorn Award 2021, having won several other awards in Europe with its innovative 5G mobile communications technologies. They have joined the Garage+ accelerator of the Epoch Foundation in Taiwan, hoping to find hardware partners from Taiwan to deliver their new model of 5G communications at lower cost and better performance.

Taiwan suppliers of high-end IC substrates, HDI boards, rigid PCBs with high layer counts and flexible PCBs are expected to have another busy year in 2021 after benefiting from pandemic-induced upgrades in electronics devices in 2020. Their increasingly tight capacity has prompted them to farm out PCB drilling operations, providing plenty of business opportunities for drilling services providers including Key Ware Electronics.

RISC-V has grabbed headlines recently as the open-source technology is now viewed as a hotbed for innovation. It is also a source of intellectual properties (IP) freely open to the market and free from political wrestling between the two largest economies in the world.

For startups expanding overseas, the most challenging is often not about obtaining capital or orders, but rather cross-cultural operations and collaboration. Evy Chang, head of investor relations at Vietnam-based Wiziin, comes from a mixed cultural background - Taiwanese and Indonesian - knows much about such challenges. Before moving to Vietnam two years ago, Chang had worked as management consultant at the Business Development Institute (BDI) and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in Shanghai.

Taiwan is the leader in many semiconductor sectors, but the "last mile" in terms of logistics and shipping centers is missing in the country - a gap that WPG Holdings is ready to fill with its plans to support the Taoyuan Aerotropolis project, according to Frank Yeh, vice chairman of the IC distributor.

COVID-19 and the US-China trade war have combined to accelerate a split of the global supply chain in two - namely a "G2" pattern with one serving China and the other the rest of the world. Such a scenario has also highlighted Taiwan's importance.

Many startups are confused about how to find angel investors, while investors are discouraged by the lack of transparency of information about startup investments. Nguyen Ngoc Tien (aka Tien Nguyen), founder and CEO of Wiziin Vietnam, saw this pain point and created a platform to connect investors with startups and quality SMEs, using artificial intelligence (AI) to help startups manage investor relationships and find potential investors, while giving investors real-time and accurate information of startups to help manage their portfolio.