6,523 Babies and a Speech About Vietnam

In February 2026, Taiwan recorded 6,523 newborns. For the first time ever, the monthly figure dropped below 7,000.

That same month, Chien Li-Feng — former managing director of Google Taiwan — gave a talk at the AAMA Taipei Cradle Program. His topic was "going global," but the underlying logic of the entire presentation came down to one thing: Taiwan is running out of people.

An Island's Arithmetic

Taiwan's stock market ranks eighth globally. Semiconductors underpin the entire supply chain. But Chien did the math: this island has to sustain global semiconductor capacity, and this island produces 6,523 babies a month.

His assessment was blunt: within five years, Taiwan won't be able to find enough talent. Within ten, it won't have enough consumers.

As industry keeps scaling up and the population base keeps shrinking, the gap will only widen. Chien also noted that 24 million people might seem like a sufficient market, but it's far from enough.

He Named Ho Chi Minh City

One line from the talk stood out.

Chien said that young Taiwanese treat Japan as a "one-day living circle." An older generation treated Shanghai and Hong Kong the same way. He wants someone to put Ho Chi Minh City in that circle too.

Because the people Taiwan lacks will have to come from outside.

Coming from a former Google managing director, this signals that Vietnam has entered the radar of Taiwan's tech and startup community. Ho Chi Minh City is three and a half hours from Taipei — about the same as flying to Tokyo.

Why Vietnam

Chien brought up a concept: learn from the Netherlands. Let other people's talent become your talent. Let other people's water and electricity become your water and electricity.

If Taiwan needs to look outward for people, Vietnam's credentials are hard to ignore.

A population of 100 million, with a median age of 33. Taiwan has 23 million people and a median age past 45. Vietnam sends hundreds of thousands of new university graduates into the workforce each year, with STEM fields as the largest category.

The ties between Taiwan and Vietnam also run deeper than most people think. Nearly 300,000 Vietnamese migrant workers are employed in Taiwan. Over 110,000 Vietnamese spouses have settled there. Foxconn, Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Pegatron, and Lite-On — Taiwan's six biggest electronics contract manufacturers — are all present in Vietnam. Cooler Master just started producing AI liquid-cooling equipment at a new plant in Bắc Ninh. The flows of people, capital, and supply chains are already running.

Chien named Ho Chi Minh City and said he hopes someone will treat it as a one-day living circle. Follow that thread: when you need talent, need a market, need a destination within a day's reach, and need existing industrial ties, Vietnam is hard to skip.

A New Logic for Going Global

Taiwanese companies have been setting up factories in Vietnam for over 30 years. But the "going global" Chien described is different from the past. Companies used to go abroad for cheap labor and land. Now they go for talent.

That shift matters.

When you build a factory, you focus on cost and efficiency. When you go looking for talent, you also need to understand the local education system, what young people think, and how the tech ecosystem works.

Vietnam's tech ecosystem has been evolving rapidly. Both Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi have active startup scenes. Homegrown tech companies like VNG and FPT keep expanding. Large numbers of young engineers graduate from Vietnamese universities and move straight into software and hardware industries.

In his talk, Chien said: "A place with no people only has money left. One day, Taiwan will be so poor that all it has left is money." His suggestion: "The reasonable way to occupy another place is to show up with capital."

Capital — Taiwan has plenty. What Taiwan lacks is people.

6,523

Back to that number.

6,523 newborns in a single month. By the time they enter the workforce, it'll be 2050. Taiwan's industries can't wait that long.

Scattered through Chien's talk were various observations and recommendations. But if you had to pick the most important line, it was what he said about Ho Chi Minh City.

What that line really meant, perhaps, is this: Taiwan needs Vietnam — and probably more urgently than most people think.

(This article draws on Chien Li-Feng's AAMA talk as summarized by Meet Startup. Thanks for sharing.)

Sources: Meet Startup, Taiwan Ministry of the Interior Household Registration Division, Worldometers