Taiwan Credit Insight 1: “Taiwan Companies” or “Taiwanese Companies”

While we were preparing the book, there was a debate whether we should use “Taiwan companies” or “Taiwanese companies”. By searching the internet, both terms "Taiwan Companies" and "Taiwanese Companies" were commonly used. Which one was the right one?

The “Taiwan companies” advocates claimed that we generally said “US companies”, “Hong Kong companies”, “UK companies”. A news search on the internet ( https://goo.gl/9BYYqN ) proved that “Taiwan companies” was used by some news editors.

The supporters of “Taiwanese companies” also had their points. We normally used “American companies” instead of “America companies”, and “Chinese companies” and not “China companies”. A similar news search ( https://goo.gl/PqhvoF ) of “Taiwanese companies” showed that another school of news editors also used this.

After some extensive research, we found that the media in English speaking countries seemed to be developing a tendency toward using a country’s name as an adjective, such as “Syria crisis” instead of “Syrian crisis”, “France fullback” instead of “French fullback”.

Additionally, Wiktionary ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Taiwanese ) indicated that “Taiwan” and “Taiwanese” were both widely used as attributives, such as Taiwan/Taiwanese culture, the Taiwan/Taiwanese government, Taiwan/Taiwanese food.
 
We further searched in the Taiwan Government’s websites ( https://goo.gl/JqN9GF ), and discovered that the Government frequently used “Taiwan companies”.

​Therefore, we decided to make it simple and adopted “Taiwan companies”.

This Credit Insight is an extract from the book Happy Customers Faster Cash, Taiwan Edition and it is now on sale at Amazon.

This book is a learning tool for people engaged in the credit process. It contains three extensive chapters about credit management, business culture and communication with the focus in Taiwan. A chapter is dedicated to discussing various aspects of Taiwan company credit reports.