Taiwan runs what is, on the registry side, the most open company data system in Asia — and then stops short of the one thing you probably came for. The Ministry of Economic Affairs publishes a free search portal, exposes the same data through an open REST API updated hourly, and licenses the whole thing under the Open Government Data Licence, permitting commercial reuse with attribution by default. It gives away directors and their shareholdings for free, which Korea does not do for private companies and most of Europe charges for. But Taiwanese private company financial statements are a different matter: they must be audited above modest thresholds, and then kept by the company and made available for inspection by the ministry — not published. The result is a jurisdiction where ownership and control are unusually transparent, financials are not, and the data itself is scattered across four separate authorities with a calendar system that will silently corrupt your dates if you are not expecting it.
GCIS: the most open registry in Asia
Taiwan's commercial register is operated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) through the Government Commerce Industrial Service (GCIS), and its access model is genuinely exceptional by the standards of this series.
- Free public search at findbiz.nat.gov.tw — no account, no local ID.
- An open-data REST API at data.gcis.nat.gov.tw, exposing the same data and updated hourly.
- Licensed under the Open Government Data Licence, which permits commercial reuse with attribution by default — a licensing position more permissive than most European registries and unmatched elsewhere in Asia.
- What you get: registered name, Unified Business Number, capital, business scope, registered address, company status, and directors together with their shareholdings.
The ownership data is the standout — and the exact inverse of Korea
Read this guide alongside the South Korea guide and the contrast is precise. Korea publishes audited financial statements for roughly 37,519 companies, most of them unlisted — and publishes no shareholder data at all for private companies. Taiwan does the opposite: it hands you directors and their shareholdings for free, through an API, hourly — and keeps private company financial statements out of the public record entirely.
For a compliance or KYB workflow, Taiwan is therefore one of the easiest jurisdictions in Asia. For a credit or financial-analysis workflow on private counterparties, it is one of the harder ones. Know which problem you are solving before you scope the work, because Taiwan is excellent at one and closed on the other.
The Unified Business Number
Every Taiwanese entity carries an 8-digit Unified Business Number (統一編號), used consistently across government systems. As with Singapore's UEN, Norway's organisation number, and Japan's Corporate Number — and unlike the United States or Canada — one key resolves an entity across databases, which removes the hardest part of building a national dataset.
Companies versus businesses: two registration regimes
Taiwan draws a distinction that matters for what you will find. Registration splits into two categories under two different statutes:
| Category | Statute | Forms | Disclosure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Companies (公司) | Company Act | 股份有限公司 (company limited by shares) · 有限公司 (limited company) · unlimited companies · limited partnerships | More formal — including director and capital disclosure |
| Businesses (商業) | Business Registration Act | Sole proprietorships · general partnerships | Lighter registration obligations |
The 股份有限公司 is the form used by every listed company and most substantial businesses — TSMC, for instance, is registered as one under UBN 22099131. The 有限公司 is the lighter limited-company form common among smaller operators. When scoping Taiwanese coverage, be clear which category you mean: "all Taiwanese businesses" includes a large sole-proprietor population with minimal registration obligations and no director disclosure at all.
How many companies
The MOEA publishes Company Registration Statistics and Business Registration Statistics through the GCIS portal, and the government open-data platform at data.gov.tw carries a dataset of existing companies and paid-up capital broken down by type of organisation and industry. This guide does not quote a single headline figure, because the count depends on which category you include and the official series are updated continuously — take the number from the MOEA statistics directly, and state whether it covers 公司 only or 公司 plus 商業.
A redaction trap in the free API
The largest companies are the least complete
One quirk of the open dataset catches out people who test their pipeline on a famous name. In the keyless GCIS open-data slice, fields including capital, registered address, and responsible person are frequently null for the largest TWSE-listed conglomerates — TSMC, Foxconn, MediaTek among them — while the same fields populate reliably for smaller and mid-cap companies.
The practical consequences are two. If you validate a Taiwan integration against a marquee company, you may wrongly conclude the API is broken or the coverage is poor; test on mid-caps instead. And for the largest issuers, the complete record comes from MOPS and the findbiz portal rather than the open-data API — another instance of Taiwan's data living across several layers rather than one.
The calendar trap
Converting ROC dates: what 0760221 actually means
ROC year 1 is 1912, so the conversion is add 1,911. The failure mode is silent — an unconverted date parses cleanly and is simply wrong — so build the conversion explicitly and verify any purchased Taiwanese dataset at the point of delivery.
ROC years will silently corrupt your data
Taiwanese corporate registries record dates in the Republic of China calendar (民國年), not the Gregorian one. ROC year 1 is 1912, so ROC year 76 is 1987, and a registry date field reading 0760221 means 21 February 1987, not the year 76 or 760.
This is the single most common technical failure in Taiwanese data ingestion, and it is dangerous precisely because it does not error — the dates parse, they are simply wrong by 1,911 years, or get silently coerced into nonsense. Any Taiwan pipeline needs an explicit ROC-to-Gregorian conversion step, and any dataset you buy should be checked at the point of delivery to confirm the conversion was done. A company "incorporated in 0870315" was incorporated in 1998.
Four authorities, one company
Taiwan's second structural characteristic is fragmentation — not across jurisdictions as in Canada, but across functions. A complete Taiwanese company profile draws on at least four separate authorities, and most analyses look only at the first.
Where the pieces of a Taiwanese company record live
MOEA covers legal identity; the substance — financial disclosure, tax status, credit standing — is split across the others. Most of the layers are free; one is restricted; and the private financial statements are in none of them.
Get financial data for private and public companies via API or in bulk — with regular updates
MonetaiQ delivers registry-sourced company financials as clean, normalised fields — income statement, balance sheet, equity, and status — in consistent English across our European coverage, alongside entity and public-filer data for Asia-Pacific and North America. Where registry financials exist we structure them; where a jurisdiction keeps them out of the public record, we say so, so your coverage assumptions match reality. Available via REST API, bulk feeds, or our MCP server to query the data directly inside Claude, ChatGPT, and other LLMs.
Private companies: audited, but not published
Taiwan requires audits at low thresholds — and then does not make the results public. Both halves of that sentence matter.
The audit thresholds
A private Taiwanese company must have its annual financial statements audited and certified by a Taiwan-licensed CPA if it meets any of the following:
Where those audited accounts go
The gap that defines Taiwanese company data
A private Taiwanese company with paid-in capital over NT$30 million must have audited financial statements. It must then keep those audited statements and make them available for examination by the MOEA. It does not file them for publication, and they do not appear on the public register.
This places Taiwan in the same family as Hong Kong — audited widely, published narrowly — but with an important difference in degree. Hong Kong audits every private company and publishes none. Taiwan audits above thresholds and publishes none, but compensates with genuinely open ownership and control data that Hong Kong charges for and Korea does not provide at all.
The practical instruction is the same one this series has repeated across Asia: the absence of a Taiwanese private company's accounts is the design of the system, not a finding about the company. The routes to a number are the counterparty directly, a foreign parent's consolidated accounts filed elsewhere, or — where the company is a listed subsidiary or supplier — inference from the listed group's disclosures.
Accounting standards
Taiwanese companies prepare financial statements under either Taiwan-IFRS (T-IFRS), the local endorsement of international standards used by listed and larger companies, or the Enterprise Accounting Standards (EAS), a simplified domestic framework for smaller entities. Because T-IFRS is endorsed IFRS, Taiwanese listed accounts are directly comparable with European IFRS filings without the reconciliation work US GAAP demands.
Beyond the financial statement audit, Taiwan applies two further audit types that are unusual and worth knowing: a tax return audit, required for companies with proceeds exceeding NT$100 million, and a capital audit, required when incorporating a company or increasing or decreasing capital. The capital audit means registered capital figures in the GCIS record have been independently verified — which makes Taiwanese capital data more reliable than in jurisdictions where capital is self-declared.
Public companies: MOPS and the monthly revenue rule
For listed companies, Taiwan's disclosure is strong, free, and machine-readable. The Market Observation Post System (公開資訊觀測站, MOPS) is jointly administered by the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) and the Taipei Exchange (TPEx) under the supervision of the Financial Supervisory Commission, and it covers listed, OTC, and emerging stock issuers.
- Free and public, with multilingual access and historical filing archives.
- Full financial statements — balance sheet, statement of comprehensive income, cash flow statement, and statement of changes in equity.
- XBRL submission is supported, giving standardised machine-readable reporting.
- Open data services support automated retrieval, including the TWSE OpenAPI at openapi.twse.com.tw, a keyless JSON gateway mirroring the disclosure feed.
- Coverage: more than 1,000 listed and OTC companies, with a single API call returning all of them for a given quarter.
- Governance and ESG disclosures sit alongside the financials in the same system.
The reporting calendar is unusually demanding
| Filing | Requirement | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| Annual financial statements | CPA audited | 4 months after fiscal year-end |
| Semi-annual financial statements | CPA audited — not merely reviewed | 2 months after the half-year |
| Q1 and Q3 reports | CPA reviewed | Quarterly |
| Monthly revenue (月營收) | Disclosed publicly | Monthly |
| Material announcements | Under Securities and Exchange Act §36-1 | Within minutes of board approval |
| Related-party transactions | Filed with variance explanations | Monthly, with quarterly reconciliation |
Monthly revenue disclosure is genuinely rare
Two features of that table have few parallels anywhere in this series. First, Taiwanese listed companies publish revenue every month — not quarterly, monthly. For anyone tracking a supply chain, a sector, or a single counterparty, this is a materially higher-frequency signal than the quarterly reporting that represents best practice in most markets, and it arrives within weeks rather than months.
Second, the semi-annual statements are audited rather than reviewed. Most jurisdictions require a full audit once a year and a lighter review at the half-year; Taiwan requires two audits. Combined with the monthly revenue feed and same-day material announcements, Taiwan's listed companies are among the most frequently and rigorously reported in the world — which makes the contrast with the closed private sector sharper still.
There is also a self-assessed income disclosure regime: where a quarter's self-assessed pre-tax profit diverges from the CPA-audited figure by 10% and more than NT$50 million, the company must file an explanation of the discrepancy within two business days.
Sustainability disclosure: phased to 2029
The FSC released its Roadmap for Taiwan's Alignment with the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards on 17 August 2023, adopting IFRS S1 and S2 by direct adoption rather than a local adaptation. Implementation is phased on paid-in capital:
| Phase | Applies to | Compile | Report in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase I | Listed and OTC companies with capital over NT$10 billion | FY2026 | 2027 |
| Phase II | Capital NT$5–10 billion | FY2027 | 2028 |
| Phase III | All other listed and OTC companies | FY2028 | 2029 |
Two design points are worth noting. Disclosure goes in a dedicated sustainability chapter of the annual report, released simultaneously with the financial report — not in a separate sustainability publication, which the FSC framed as a response to greenwashing risk. And transitional relief is generous: climate-only in the first year, Scope 3 delayed by a year, comparative-period information exempt in year one, and qualitative disclosure permitted where quantification is genuinely difficult, such as climate scenario analysis and resilience assessment.
Materiality follows a single-materiality approach, consistent with the existing FSC guidelines for banks and insurers — a meaningful difference from the EU's double-materiality model that matters when comparing Taiwanese and European sustainability data.
The economy behind the exchange
Taiwan's listed market is dominated to an unusual degree by a single industry. Semiconductors and electronics — TSMC above all, alongside MediaTek, Hon Hai/Foxconn, UMC, and ASE — account for a very large share of market capitalisation and exports. Beyond that sit petrochemicals and plastics, steel and heavy industry, financial holding companies, and shipping, which had an extraordinary run during the pandemic freight cycle.
The data-relevant consequence mirrors the point made in the Canada and Greece guides: any average computed across "Taiwanese listed companies" is heavily weighted toward semiconductors. Segment by sector before benchmarking, and remember that the enormous tier-two and tier-three electronics supplier base — much of which sits below the listing threshold — is audited but unpublished.
Insolvency and the early-warning rule
Taiwan's distress framework has one feature that is directly useful for monitoring, and one significant limitation.
The half-capital rule
A statutory early-warning trigger
Under Taiwanese law, if a company incurs losses amounting to half of its paid-in capital, the board of directors must report them at the next shareholders' meeting. And if the company's assets are insufficient to satisfy its debts, the board must in principle declare bankruptcy.
For a listed company this creates a genuine early-warning signal in the public record — a disclosed half-capital loss is a formal, dated event rather than an inference from the numbers. Combined with monthly revenue disclosure and the self-assessed income variance rule, it means Taiwanese listed-company deterioration surfaces unusually early and unusually explicitly. For a private company the same duty exists but the report goes to shareholders, not the public — so the signal is real but invisible from outside.
Bankruptcy and reorganisation
- Bankruptcy under the Taiwan Bankruptcy Act: a petition may be filed by one or more creditors. The court must decide within seven days, extendable by a further seven — though in practice the process is often prolonged by the complexity of insolvency cases, and the court typically requires the petitioner to prove the prerequisites are met.
- Reorganisation (重整) under the Company Act — the rehabilitation route, oriented to companies with going-concern value.
As across East Asia, the insolvency record is more useful for what it adds than as a primary financial source — and in Taiwan's case, considerably less useful than the monthly and quarterly listed-company disclosures that precede it.
Four pitfalls in Taiwanese financial data workflows
Pitfall 1: Not converting ROC years
Registry dates use the Republic of China calendar, where year 1 is 1912. A date of 0760221 is 21 February 1987. The failure is silent — dates parse successfully and are simply wrong — so build an explicit conversion step and verify any purchased dataset at delivery.
Pitfall 2: Expecting private financials because the company is audited
Taiwan audits at low thresholds but does not publish. Audited private statements are held by the company for MOEA inspection. Audit obligation and public disclosure are separate things here, as in Hong Kong.
Pitfall 3: Using only the MOEA registry
GCIS covers legal identity, capital, scope, status, directors and shareholdings. Financial disclosure, tax status, and credit standing sit with the FSC, the Ministry of Finance, TDCC, and JCIC respectively. A complete profile joins several sources.
Pitfall 4: Latin-script-only name matching
Company names are registered in Traditional Chinese, and English names exist reliably only for listed firms. A matching pipeline built on Latin script will fail on a large share of the register.
How Taiwan compares
| Jurisdiction | Private financials | Ownership data | Registry API |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taiwan | Audited, not published | Free — directors with shareholdings | Open, hourly, commercial reuse permitted |
| South Korea | ~37,519 publish audited accounts | Not published for private companies | DART Open API |
| Hong Kong | Audited, not published | Paid — HK$22 per search | None |
| Japan | Required but 1.8% comply; GK exempt | Paid via Touki, Japanese only | Corporate Number API (identity only) |
| Singapore | Most companies, except solvent EPCs | Paid — S$5.50 profile | Bulk data + API |
Taiwan and South Korea together make the point that "transparency" is not one variable. Korea is the best jurisdiction in East Asia for private company financials and among the weakest for private ownership. Taiwan is the reverse. Hong Kong is closed on both but cheap and fast. Japan has a universal rule almost nobody follows. A regional data strategy that treats these four as interchangeable will fail; one that routes each question to the jurisdiction that answers it well will not.
MonetaiQ vs the Taiwanese registries: what each is for
| Dimension | GCIS / MOPS | MonetaiQ |
|---|---|---|
| Legal authority | Authoritative — the official register of record | Derived — not a substitute for an official extract |
| Cost | Free, including the API, under an open licence | Subscription |
| Ownership & directors | Excellent and free — directors with shareholdings, hourly updates | Same data, resolved and normalised across jurisdictions |
| Listed company financials | Excellent — MOPS, XBRL, keyless API, monthly revenue | Parsed into a common schema for cross-country comparison |
| Private company financials | Not published — held by the company for MOEA inspection | No provider can supply what was never published. Ask any vendor claiming otherwise whether the figures are modelled. |
| Date handling | ROC calendar — conversion required | Converted to Gregorian at ingestion |
| Language | Traditional Chinese; English reliably only for listed firms | English field names and values; name resolution across scripts |
| Source consolidation | Four authorities, joined manually | Single entity record |
When the free tier wins — and Taiwan's does, often
Be straightforward: Taiwan has one of the best free company-data offerings in this series. The GCIS API is open, hourly, and licensed for commercial reuse; the TWSE OpenAPI is keyless; both are free. If you need Taiwanese entity identity, directors, shareholdings, or listed company financials, go and use them — no commercial layer improves on a free, hourly, openly-licensed API.
The commercial case in Taiwan is narrow and specific: ROC date conversion done correctly, Traditional Chinese to Latin-script name resolution, joining four authorities into one entity record, and normalising T-IFRS filings alongside European and North American accounts in a single schema. What no provider can do is produce a private Taiwanese company's audited accounts, because they were never published. Any vendor claiming comprehensive Taiwanese private-company financials is supplying modelled or researched estimates — legitimate, but not filed data. Ask which.
Looking to build financial AI agents, or need financial data to train your AI models?
MonetaiQ delivers registry-sourced company financials — balance sheets, profit and loss, equity, entity type, and status — as clean, normalised, structured data built for machine consumption. Deep European coverage across the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Luxembourg, and more, in consistent English-language fields. Get it in bulk for model training, via API for live agent workflows, or through our MCP server — plug verified company financials straight into Claude, ChatGPT, or any MCP-compatible agent, so your model reasons over registry-sourced data instead of guessing.
Frequently asked questions
Is Taiwanese company data publicly available?
Entity and ownership data, yes and freely. The Ministry of Economic Affairs runs a free search portal at findbiz.nat.gov.tw and an open REST API at data.gcis.nat.gov.tw updated hourly, licensed under the Open Government Data Licence permitting commercial reuse with attribution. It returns registered name, Unified Business Number, capital, business scope, address, status, and directors with their shareholdings. Private company financial statements, however, are not published.
Can I get financial statements for private Taiwanese companies?
Not from the public record. A private company must have its accounts audited by a Taiwan-licensed CPA if it exceeds any of the thresholds, but it then keeps those audited statements and makes them available for examination by the Ministry of Economic Affairs rather than filing them for publication. The absence of accounts is the design of the system, not a finding about the company. The realistic routes are the counterparty directly or a foreign parent's consolidated accounts filed elsewhere.
Which Taiwanese companies must be audited?
A private company must have its annual financial statements audited and certified by a Taiwan-licensed CPA if it meets any of: paid-in capital of NT$30 million or more, annual sales of NT$100 million or more, 100 or more employees, or a local bank loan of NT$30 million or more. Public companies and financial institutions are audited regardless of size. These are low thresholds internationally — NT$30 million is roughly USD 1 million.
Does Taiwan have a company registry API?
Yes, and an unusually good one. The MOEA exposes GCIS data through an open REST API at data.gcis.nat.gov.tw with hourly updates, licensed under the Open Government Data Licence so commercial reuse with attribution is permitted by default. Separately, the TWSE operates a keyless JSON OpenAPI at openapi.twse.com.tw mirroring MOPS disclosures. Both are free.
What is MOPS?
The Market Observation Post System (公開資訊觀測站), Taiwan's electronic corporate disclosure platform, jointly administered by the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange under Financial Supervisory Commission supervision. It covers listed, OTC, and emerging stock issuers, publishing full financial statements, material announcements, governance and ESG disclosures, and monthly revenue. XBRL submission is supported and open data services allow automated retrieval.
What is the ROC calendar problem in Taiwanese data?
Taiwanese corporate registries record dates in the Republic of China calendar, where year 1 is 1912. So ROC year 76 is 1987, and a date field reading 0760221 means 21 February 1987. The failure mode is dangerous because it is silent: the dates parse successfully and are simply wrong by 1,911 years. Any Taiwan data pipeline needs an explicit ROC-to-Gregorian conversion step, and purchased datasets should be verified at delivery.
Do Taiwanese listed companies report monthly?
Yes, for revenue — a requirement with few parallels internationally. Listed companies publish monthly revenue figures alongside quarterly reporting, giving a materially higher-frequency signal than the quarterly best practice in most markets. Semi-annual financial statements are also CPA audited rather than merely reviewed, so Taiwanese listed companies undergo two full audits a year, and material announcements are filed within minutes of board approval under Securities and Exchange Act §36-1.
When must Taiwanese companies file financial statements?
Public companies must have annual financial statements audited and certified by a CPA within four months of fiscal year-end, semi-annual statements audited within two months of the half-year, and first and third quarter reports reviewed by a CPA. Private companies have no public filing deadline because they do not file publicly; they keep audited statements available for ministry inspection.
What is a Unified Business Number?
Taiwan's 8-digit company identifier (統一編號), assigned to every registered entity and used consistently across government systems. Like Singapore's UEN, Norway's organisation number, and Japan's Corporate Number, it means one key resolves an entity across databases — removing the entity-resolution problem that affects the United States and Canada.
Do Taiwanese companies use IFRS?
Listed and larger companies use Taiwan-IFRS (T-IFRS), the local endorsement of international standards, so their accounts are directly comparable with European IFRS filings without the reconciliation US GAAP requires. Smaller entities use the Enterprise Accounting Standards, a simplified domestic framework.
What company types exist in Taiwan?
Registration splits into two categories. Companies (公司) under the Company Act include companies limited by shares (股份有限公司), limited companies (有限公司), unlimited companies, and limited partnerships, and carry more formal disclosure requirements including director and capital disclosure. Businesses (商業) under the Business Registration Act cover sole proprietorships and general partnerships with lighter obligations. The 股份有限公司 is the form used by every listed company and most substantial businesses.
Why are capital and address fields empty for big Taiwanese companies?
Because the keyless GCIS open-data slice selectively blanks them. Fields including capital, registered address, and responsible person are frequently null for the largest TWSE-listed conglomerates such as TSMC, Foxconn, and MediaTek, while populating reliably for smaller and mid-cap companies. If you validate a Taiwan integration against a marquee name you may wrongly conclude the API is broken. Test on mid-caps, and use MOPS and the findbiz portal for the largest issuers.
Does Taiwan require sustainability reporting?
Yes, phased to 2029. The FSC released its roadmap on 17 August 2023 adopting IFRS S1 and S2 by direct adoption. Listed and OTC companies with paid-in capital over NT$10 billion compile FY2026 information and report in 2027; those with NT$5-10 billion compile FY2027 and report in 2028; all other listed and OTC companies compile FY2028 and report in 2029. Disclosure goes in a dedicated chapter of the annual report released simultaneously with the financial report, and Taiwan uses a single-materiality approach.
How does insolvency work in Taiwan?
Through bankruptcy under the Taiwan Bankruptcy Act and reorganisation (重整) under the Company Act. A bankruptcy petition may be filed by one or more creditors and the court must decide within seven days, extendable by a further seven, though the process is often prolonged in practice. Taiwan also has a statutory early-warning rule: if a company incurs losses amounting to half of its paid-in capital, the board must report them at the next shareholders' meeting, and if assets are insufficient to satisfy debts the board must in principle declare bankruptcy.
How many companies are registered in Taiwan?
The MOEA publishes Company Registration Statistics and Business Registration Statistics through the GCIS portal, and the government open-data platform at data.gov.tw carries a dataset of existing companies and paid-up capital by type of organisation and industry. The right figure depends on whether you include only companies (公司) or also businesses (商業) such as sole proprietorships, so take the number from the MOEA statistics directly and state which category it covers.
How does Taiwan compare with South Korea for company data?
They are close to exact inverses. Korea publishes audited financial statements for roughly 37,519 companies, most of them unlisted, but publishes no shareholder data for private companies. Taiwan publishes directors with their shareholdings free through an hourly API but keeps private company financial statements out of the public record entirely. Korea is stronger for credit and financial analysis of private counterparties; Taiwan is stronger for ownership, control, and KYB work.
Why do I need more than the MOEA registry for a Taiwanese company?
Because Taiwan splits company data across at least four authorities. The MOEA's GCIS covers legal identity, capital, business scope, status, and directors with shareholdings. Listed company financial disclosure sits with the Financial Supervisory Commission through MOPS, tax compliance with the Ministry of Finance, shareholding distribution for listed companies with the TDCC depository, and credit data with the JCIC, where access is restricted. Most of these layers are free, but they must be joined manually.
