Businesses should mitigate risks by decreasing their dependence on the politically directed and highly uncertain Chinese market, Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corp (TTL) chairman Ting Yen-che (丁彥哲) said yesterday.
Beijing in the middle of last year banned TTL products from being imported in a move that could have caused more damage if the company did not diversify its markets in the past 20 years, he said in an interview with the Liberty Times (the sister newspaper of the Taipei Times).
TTL formerly had a high level of dependence on China and a significant part of its market in China consisted of expatriate Taiwanese businesspeople who wanted to drink Taiwan Beer, Ting said.
Photo: Chen Yi-ling, Taipei TImes
China accounted for 20 percent of TTL’s total sales before declining to a point that Beijing’s import ban had no discernible impact on overseas sales, he said.
TTL had intelligence indicating a need to spread risks and took steps to expand its markets several years prior to the ban, Ting said.
It launched an aggressive effort to expand its presence in Southeast Asia, the US, Japan, South Korea and even the Middle East, largely offsetting the impact of the ban on the company’s sales this year, he said.
Asked to comment on Chinese beer exports to Taiwan, Ting said many US and Japanese brands that sell beer to the nation had moved their production to China to cut costs.
Consumers who feel uneasy about consuming beer made in certain nations should check the nation of origin on product labels before making a purchase, he said.
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