Hongkongers seeking escape from ‘chaos’ benefit from ‘pull factor’ of Taiwan’s coronavirus resistant economy

Taiwan’s economy grew by 3.11 per cent in 2020, while Hong Kong’s followed the global trend amid the coronavirus and shrank by 6.1 per cent last year

Taiwan has reported less than 1,000 coronavirus cases and just 10 deaths, with the government projecting its economy will grow by 4.64 per cent in 2021

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Last year, while the Hong Kong economy shrank by 6.1 per cent, business operations and consumer spending in Taiwan never stopped even as the coronavirus halted both across the world. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 2:30pm, 13 Mar 2021Updated: 4:00pm, 13 Mar 2021

Attracted by something Hong Kong could not – a mature enough technology ecosystem and a big enough market of paying customers – Alan Chan’s decision to take his start-up business to Taiwan in 2018 proved to be a masterstroke.

His OmniChat business, which aggregates messenger service data in complex Chinese characters for e-commerce use, now employs 15 people in Taiwan compared to four in Hong Kong and pulls in around HK$5 million (US$644,000) per year.

“Taiwan is the most important market in Asia, so I need to start here and possibly scale upwards somewhere else,” said 35-year-old Chan.

His arrival came just before a wave of Hong Kong citizens received permission to stay long-term in Taiwan in 2019 and 2020, but unlike many, Chan’s move was not driven by the fallout from the anti-government protests in Hong Kong.

Chan was attracted by Taiwan’s market of 24 million people, and an economy that was already strong and was then one that was able to grow and prosper in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, something that Hong Kong’s and many others around the world could not.