Conway Lee, CEO of the Taiwanese electronics company BenQ has nothing but lavish praise for the living and working conditions that Eindhoven has to offer. That's what he said yesterday at a seminar involving around a hundred IT companies who wished to find out what opportunities they could gain in Europe by setting up shop in the southern Netherlands. The Brabant Development Agency was one of the seminar's organisers.

Conway Lee lived and worked in Eindhoven for nine years as the manager of BenQ's European head office until 2007. The Taiwanese company, which gained fame under the name of Acer, is a world-player in the field of consumer electronics. BenQ manufactures projectors, LCD monitors and digital cameras, amongst other products. The company is also active in the computer and communications sectors. The 50-man Eindhoven branch is the holding company of the BenQ branches in Europe, counting sales as one of its areas of focus.

Lee detailed the positive aspects for foreign companies in setting up a branch in Brabant and Eindhoven. The international orientation of the region and the multilingual inhabitants that live and work there were especially striking to him. He also reserved top marks for the logistical qualities the region offers, and had nothing but praise for the labour market. He believed the latter to be characterised by its flexibility and productivity. But the best thing about Eindhoven for him was the culture and the mentality that he had encountered there. They were a major contributing factor to him feeling at home in Dutch society within a very short period of time.

Lee has now moved up to CEO and chairman of BenQ in Taiwan, and he was one of the speakers at the seminar for Taiwanese companies that was hosted by the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA) together with the leading IT magazine DigiTimes, a periodical with 150,000 subscribers in Taiwan.

The seminar was devoted to the opportunities that the southern Netherlands offers Taiwanese companies that want to launch European branches. Together with LIOF, the Limburg Development and Investment Company, the Brabant Development Agency highlighted the excellent conditions for establishing a company in the two southern provinces. An increasing number of Taiwanese companies are settling on Brabant and Limburg as the perfect location for tackling the European market. Today there are around 50 companies from the island republic in the region, together employing some 1,500 people. Logistics, sales and service are their major activities, and the High Tech Campus in Brabant has been a particularly powerful draw card for IT companies from Taiwan.

It again emerged during the seminar that a number of Taiwanese companies were seriously considering making the step to Europe, which explains the great deal of interest shown in the seminar. Given the current economic developments and the focus of Taiwanese companies on mainland China, this was all the more surprising. The BenQ CEO maintains that Europe is the most important market for these companies after Asia.