Paper: The Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation: To ‘join the ranks of global companies’
From: The View from Taiwan
So there I was, surfing the net, and stumbled across this paper on the Tobacco and Liquor Monopoly’s drive to become a global corporation: Jappe Eckhardt, Jennifer Fang and Kelley Lee (2017) The Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation: To ‘join the ranks of global companies’, Global Public Health, 12:3, 335-350. It notes:
In this context, this paper analyses how TTL shifted, from a company focused on domestic customers, to a more outward looking company. TTL’s ambitions to globalise were initially prompted by a significant decline in domestic market share due to foreign competition from the 1990s onwards and further fuelled by WTO membership and the adoption of stricter domestic tobacco control regulations. Efforts to expand exports and other foreign operations have been limited by the company’s bureaucratic nature, and ongoing political tensions between Taiwan and China. However, by building on the success of TTL’s alcohol export business and by taking advantage of potential warming relations with China, TTL has the opportunity to become a regional company with global ambitions.
According to the paper, the current TTL has its origins in the old Japanese opium monopoly (which I discussed here). That agency then took in the pharma, camphor, and salt bureau to form the Monopoly Bureau. The authors relate:
