• Getting into the room is the hard part.

    I interview Taiwanese enterprise executives on site, in Mandarin, and turn what they say into case study material your team can publish.

    Taipei, Taiwan · 1,500+ executive interviews since 1997 · 350+ enterprise clients

  • How the work runs

    Three stages. I handle all three.

    1

    On-site interview, in Mandarin

    I go to the customer's office with your local team and sit down with the CIO, the project lead, whoever actually did the work. I ask the questions that produce usable material rather than approved talking points. Recorded, with a question guide agreed in advance.

    2

    Traditional Chinese manuscript

    A full case study written in Traditional Chinese, following your template. This is the version your local customer reviews and approves. It is usually where global programmes stall, because the customer will not sign off on a document they cannot read properly.

    3

    English draft

    Delivered ready for editorial review. Your editors do what editors do: cut, tighten, fact-check with the customer. What they will not have to do is start from a transcript.

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    Where this comes from

    I have been interviewing people for a living since 1997. I started on the news desk of a Taiwanese industry research institute, then moved into business writing. Somewhere past 1,500 executive interviews, across 350+ companies: semiconductor supply chain, EMS and ODM manufacturing, banking and securities, telecommunications, government research institutions.

    From 2017 to 2025 I worked as a contracted supplier to a UK-based customer-evidence agency, producing Taiwan case studies for a global enterprise software vendor's Asia-Pacific reference programme. Nine projects over eight years. Contract renewed twice.

    The work followed the same shape every time. The agency's regional project manager briefed me from Singapore, the vendor's Taiwan marketing team joined the interview, and I delivered the source material the global programme needed.

  • Published, and public

    Four of these case studies are live on the vendor's own site, each built from an interview I ran in Taiwan.

    KGI Securities: core system transformation

    Taiwan's second-largest brokerage, moving its trading core off a 1988-era mainframe architecture. I ran the interview with the Asia Pacific CIO, wrote the Traditional Chinese manuscript, and worked on the English version with the vendor's global editorial team. Read the case study.

    Cathay United Bank: digital transformation

    One of Taiwan's largest commercial banks. Published in both Traditional Chinese and English: the same interview, two language versions. Read in English. Read in Traditional Chinese.

    Taiwan Business Bank: digital banking foundation

    Taiwan's specialist bank for small and medium-sized businesses, rebuilding its customer-facing systems on a container platform to keep up with online demand. Read the case study.

    National Center for High-performance Computing: research cloud

    Taiwan's national supercomputing centre, building a shared education cloud that gives universities across the island access to high-performance computing. Read the case study.

  • Still in the room

    I am a contributing writer for Business Weekly (商業周刊), Taiwan's largest business magazine, writing enterprise features and executive interviews.

    This matters for one reason. Access is not a credential you earn once. Executives agree to sit down with someone whose work they have seen, in a publication they read. That is why the interviews still happen, and why they still last three hours instead of thirty minutes.

    The part that does not scale

    A global marketing team can find an English writer in an afternoon. There are thousands of them, they are good, and they are not the constraint.

    The constraint is upstream. Someone has to be physically in Taipei or Hsinchu, speaking Mandarin, with enough industry background to know that "we improved efficiency" is not an answer and to ask the follow-up that gets a real one. Someone the customer's legal and marketing teams will approve. Someone who can then produce a Traditional Chinese document the customer will actually sign off on.

    That is a small group of people. It is not getting larger.

  • Who this is for

    I take on a small number of these projects at a time. Individual case studies, or a set across a programme.

    Global and regional marketing teams

    Teams that need Taiwan customer stories but have no writer on the ground, and no practical way to run an interview in a language the head office does not speak.

    Content and customer-evidence agencies

    Agencies running Asia-Pacific reference programmes that need a reliable Taiwan resource inside an existing workflow, templates and all.

  • timothy@timothylan.com

    Timothy Lan (藍浩益) · Taipei, Taiwan

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