Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) on January 4 announced it will set up a task force to specifically boost the development of Taiwan as an innovation and production center for smart hand-held devices through cooperation with the Taipei Computer Association (TCA).

The move is in response to TCA president JT Wang's recommendation to Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou on July 23, 2010 that smart hand-held devices be a core of development of Taiwan's ICT industry.

Taiwan-based makers will ship a total of 68 million smartphones in 2011, accounting for 23.8% of the global total, the MOEA indicated. The task force aims to increase the total production value generated by Taiwan's supply chain of smart hand-held devices from NT$501.9 billion (US$16.3 billion) in 2010 to NT$1,680 billion in 2014, MOEA pointed out.