Contract Manufacturing | 龍潭渴望園區, 1989 — The Company Town Acer Built, and the Name It Lost

A computer company built a town here. Not a campus, a town: 172 hectares on the 銅鑼圈 tableland above 龍潭, two hundred to three hundred metres up, with housing, a school, a hotel, an industrial estate and a park of ten thousand ping.

A third of the land was left as conservation ground and never built on. Industry got about a fifth of it, housing about a fifth, research and education six per cent.

Acer began it in 1989, under the name 宏碁渴望園區. It was the first park in Taiwan developed with private money rather than by the state, which had built 新竹科學園區 nine years earlier.

The scale of it is a measure of what Acer thought it was becoming. A Taiwanese firm with a global consumer brand needed somewhere its engineers would live, and the company would provide that too.

Then the brand ran into the factory.

By 2000 Acer was losing money, and the reason was structural rather than seasonal. It sold computers under its own name and built computers for other people's names, and the second business kept losing customers to the first.

On 26 December 2000 Acer announced that it would separate the two. 緯創資通, Wistron, was formally established on 30 May 2001 to take the contract manufacturing, and shareholders approved the transfer that June.

明基電通, BenQ, went its own way as a third group. Acer kept the brand.

Taiwanese company law had no procedure for this. It covered mergers and not separations, and Wistron's own account of the period is that the paperwork and the lobbying took two and a half years, with the company reaching the stock exchange in August 2003.

Wistron was the piece nobody wanted at the time. It is now the group's strongest business.

施振榮 described the arrangement as brothers climbing a mountain, each making their own way up, and the phrase stuck to it.

ASUS ran the same separation seven years later, and the industry now treats it as a rule: you cannot be both the brand and the builder for long.

The park kept going and lost the company from its name. In 2005 宏碁渴望園區 became 龍潭渴望園區, named for the place instead of its founder, and in 2022 桃園市 made the area its own village, 渴望里.

Visitors can walk in. The hotel, 渴望渡假會館, is open, the central park and the tree-lined boulevards are public, and the pin is the hotel because it is the one address here that expects strangers.

The factory units are working premises with no visitor access. The photographs show the boulevard and the park, which is the part of a company town that outlives the company.

Photos: Foxy Who, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.