A lot of Taiwan’s software talents ended up working at very large hardware-oriented companies, working on the software that’s specific to that particular hardware innovation. It’s not that Taiwan doesn’t have software innovation. It’s just subsumed under the hardware innovation.

For a long time, Taiwan’s software talent worked as one part of the hardware ecosystem. That is to say, when every new generation of hardware innovation comes, it of course requires software, firmware, drivers, the application that stems from those new hardware and so on.

The thing is that Taiwan’s software talents for a very long time worked as part of the hardware innovation cycle. That is to say, when a new generation of hardware comes, be it personal computers, peripherals or whatever...

In all those cases you mentioned, there’s plenty of software, as well. In a mobile phone, it’s almost all software-defined, its features and so on.

The HTC team.

I don’t know any software-oriented national investment, other than the sovereign investment Singapore, but it just may be that I haven’t been reading up on all these things.

What we’re seeing the Asia Connecting to Silicon Valley as new is just it’s focusing on the more software or a more data-based, analytics-based, a more soft part in the value chain. The hardware part, peripheral semiconductor part, that’s already being taken care of by existing structures, so we’re not ...

That’s the thing that I was talking about. The other thing is that there’s plenty of public-private partnerships of this kind, even back in the Hsinchu Science Park days, that the III, the ITRI, are all set up to make public-private partnerships possible.

It’s one thing to invest or bring up an ecosystem in culture or in pop music, or in whatever. In other things like, for example, the thing we’re talking about here is about IoT, about biotech, about digital transformation, and the same size doesn’t really do the same thing in ...

It’s unwise to compare those investment structures and size of the investment structures versus size of the investment structures because they operate in different verticals.

Korea did something like that. They don’t call it a national investment company. They call it a fund of funds or something like that. That was in 2005.

These new structures that you’re now seeing is more tailored on the new IoT and software, or this upper side value chain investment that is not covered by traditional structures, that was taking care of mostly semiconductor peripherals and other part of the hardware ecosystem, so it’s not entirely new.

I don’t really think so. This whole idea of having the private sector joining the government in a public-private partnership, that is not a new invention. Even during the Hsinchu Science Park era, the Taiwan government already did that with innovative structures like the III and the ITRI that was ...

I mostly just look at the local ecosystem as well, connecting to the Silicon Valley. If you would like a more detailed comparison to Singapore, to Japan, and to Korea, that would be the role of the investment officer of the ASVDA.

Well, the point of this investment is to look at the local value chain, and I don’t really know whether the national investment company, or national-level investment companies work in Japan and Korea.

I can look at both sides of things, and it’s structurally very different. I wouldn’t compare one to the other. There is a sovereign investment...

On the other hand, the Singaporean government is run more like a company than the Taiwanese government. [laughs]

Singapore has its own sovereign fund. I wouldn’t comment too much about Singapore because it’s quite different. It’s not at arm’s length with the Singaporean government.

The Taiwania is too soon to say. They’ve literally just formed.

It is.

Mm-hmm.

Something like 1.5 billion NT dollars.

The larger medium enterprises, but when it was first set up, it also said small enterprises can apply if they have a good enough plan for digital transformation.

Medium enterprises, actually.

Larger companies, yes, but encouraging them to do digital transformation.

There’s another one that is currently being reviewed that is a biotech company. That was in July. I think that’s it, actually. Most of it hasn’t been...

I think it’s just one particular case where it has funded. It’s a textile automation company.

July 26th.

They were formed for more than a year now. It was formed in...

The middle one, the industry transformation one.

The first case where it actually made the investment was actually in June, so not too long ago.

That’s fine.

The second one, the transformational one. Just a second, let me quickly find it.

Something like that, yes.

That’s fine.

Of course, it’s an angel fund, so they are small companies. Otherwise, it won’t be called an angel fund.

It’s mostly about toward what we call circulation economy. That is to say, environmental protection, green energy, and things like that. It’s most easy to get this fund. I think one in five green energy circular economy companies gets this funding.

Right.

About 900 million in total.

About 300.

Sorry for all those technical details.

Yes.

That’s right. It’s just its operated differently. Cumulatively, it’s about 300 companies.

There is a period where there’s the old fund, but it’s still investment.

Then it dries up, and then we set up an equally-sized fund that is purely investment.

There is this old fund. Before it’s dried up, it switched from a subsidy to an investment.

It’s very technical, you see.

You don’t really want the old fund’s numbers?

Yeah, but that’s the new round of investments. There was this old fund, that was a subsidy...

No, until March. If you want the March quarter, I think that’s another 20. When you add it up, it’s about 300.