design in taiwan?

I have a (futur?) client that is currently doing his design work in taiwan by local ID firm.
I have to give him a price for a project and I was wondering if anyone knew what are the taiwanese rates for design…
If here we charge from 60 to 100$/hour, how much do they charge there?

This is to have an idea of what I am competing against…

Thanks

G

The conversion rate works out to be

$60.00USD = $1,822.44NT$

to

$100.00USD = $3,037.40NT$

Hi,

I am not asking what a taiwan dollar is worth…

I want to know what are their hourly fees…I am sure they don’t charge 100USD per hour like they do here…

Oh, sorry. I don’t deal with Taiwan. Hold tight, someone should chime in soon…

I have never gotten pricing from Taiwan for ID, but I do get pricing for CNC and other manufacturing from there. I have also been there at a major ODM. From everything I have seen, I would expect that they will bill out at 1/2 of what you think is legit here and have 2 people working on it.

So, 30 - 60/hr. with each hr = 2 man hours.

I can ask a collegue that does CNC machining for me what he thinks, but it would take a day or three to get a response (especially considering it is already Friday there).

PM me if you’re interested in me making the inquiry.

A few data points. Salaries for Taiwan designers (at design firms) are approx. 50% of US designers from lower cost areas (like the mid-west and south) and 33% of US designers from the larger urban areas like SF, Boston, Chicago, and NY. An entry-level designer in Taipei makes around 50K NTD per month. Add in the typical Chinese New Year bonus of 1 months salary, and the yearly salary is approx. 650K NTD per year (US$21.6K per year). A senior-level designer makes around 80K NTD per month, so 104.0K NTD per year (US$34.7K per year). These are rough numbers, but should give you some idea for comparison.

However, there are several additional factors. Taiwan designers typically work more hours, on average, than US designers (at least the US designers I know). Also, their project schedules are a lot tighter. For example, US designers might schedule 2 weeks for initial design concepts, whereas Taiwanese design firms might only take 2 or 3 days. Also, almost all of the projects are billed on a fixed price basis, not based upon the hour. Finally, some ODM companies (and even tooling companies) will throw in the design for free or at a vastly reduced price in order to get the production business, which has depressed ID consulting prices in Taiwan dramatically in the past 5 years.

All of these factors make the price that a Taiwanese design firm charges a lot less than what a US design firm can charge. I have heard stories of large Taiwanese design firms doing a mobile phone project from concepts to 3D files for under US$6,000! Bottom line, you can’t compete on price (at least not in a sustainable way). The best way to attack the problem is to focus on the value that you will bring. If you can convince the client that your firm would be valuable to the project, then the pricing issue will come up as a point of negotiation rather than an immediate disqualifier.