Taiwan's Yacht Industry: A Tale of Two Entrepreneurial Firms

This paper studies the evolution of Taiwan's yacht industry in general, and in particular we focus on two entrepreneurial firms, the Horizon Yacht Company and the Jade Yacht Company. Our purposes are two-fold. First, most research studies on Taiwan's economic success are based on the neoclassical economic model, which uses a proportional input-output production function, and emphasizes aggregate data to explain economic growth. We instead emphasize the role of entrepreneurship, which allows us to investigate closely how each individual firm discovers opportunities, exploits profits, and accumulates its capabilities to create perpetual wealth. Second, Taiwan is a very entrepreneurial society and its entrepreneurial spirit permeates into every corner with successful stories not just confined to some champion industries, such as integrated circuits (ICs), personal computers (PCs), etc. Taiwan's yacht industry, though it sailed through stormy periods in the late 1980s, has learned to grow to be a much more competitive player on the world stage. We show two cases of yacht corporations, Horizon and Jade, to shed light on how the firms use variant strategies to build their continuous competitive advantages, to meet challenges, and to galvanize their capabilities on their pathway to growth.