Human resources executives at Hwa Meei Optical are working overtime. The Taiwanese sunglasses and goggles maker is looking to hire 30 workers, many of them urgently, for a new factory.
Having based most of its production in China for more than two decades, Hwa Meei is now expanding at home. A new plant in Taiwan, opened earlier this year, will create 180 jobs and is part of a plan to expand the group’s footprint in higher margin products.
Hwa Meei is not an outlier. Hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese enterprises are bidding farewell to China because of rising costs and trade tensions between Washington and Beijing, marking a dramatic shift for Taiwan’s corporate landscape with significant implications for global manufacturing.