Qiu also said another important factor in weathering the crisis was that Top Victory owned independent intellectual property rights for its products.

"If a company only engages in OEM production, it will find it difficult to live on if its clients collapse," he said.

Jason Hsuan, Chairman of TPV Technology Ltd., the listed body of TPV Group, also emphasized that companies must have their own brands if they want to survive an economic downturn.

Qiu said big companies such as Top Victory have another advantage over small and medium-sized manufacturers to help them counteract financial crisis. They have abundant capital supplies and are able to easily reduce their costs. Top Victory has tapped its capital supply to upgrade its products quickly to meet the needs of its customers, while smaller companies cannot always do so, Qiu said. For instance, Top Victory used to be focused on the production of CRT televisions, which were cumbersome and outdated in light of newer technologies. After LCD television was invented and sets started to be sold on the market, Top Victory executives quickly decided that LCD TV would be the future trend and started pouring money into LCD monitor research and development. To date, the company is ranked sixth in the world in LCD TV production output, Qiu said.

"Such good results cannot be achieved without big capital support," he said.

From Taiwan to the mainland

Top Victory, a Taiwan-invested company, set up shop in Fuqing in 1990 when the city was a deserted place full of weeds. According to information on TPV Group's Website, the Fuqing factory was the first Taiwan-invested electronics company on the mainland.

The company originally had planned to set up a small factory with no more than 2,000 employees. The local government granted Top Victory a number of favorable policies such as low rent to help start the factory.

Location was also a factor in the company's decision to establish operations in Fuqing. "Convenient transportation is an important factor, because Fuqing is not far away from Fuzhou Harbor, which can quickly distribute Top Victory products to the world," Qiu said.

A new direct link plan for transportation between the mainland and Taiwan also will benefit Top Victory. On November 4, the mainland and Taiwan signed the "Three Direct Links" pact to create direct links in post, transportation and trade between the two areas. Direct transportation will greatly shorten the time and cost of transporting goods between the mainland and Taiwan, Qiu said. Before the pact, companies in both areas had to transfer their products to an intermediary location, often Hong Kong or Macao, before they were sent to their final destinations.

Company growth

TPV Group has more than 16,000 employees and total assets of $1.4 billion. It has eight manufacturing centers, including three overseas in Poland, the Czech Republic and Brazil.

"Economies of scale have improved our performance, and we have reduced production costs by importing spare parts from Asian nations," Hsuan said, adding that the group plans to increase its sales to $20 billion in 2013.

Hsuan also said the group's strong research and development team has been its lifeline. TPV has more than 1,000 engineers dedicated to designing new products for customers.

The only bump that TPV has felt from the global financial crisis has been in the share price of the Hong Kong-listed TPV Technology Ltd. Its shares dropped to their current price of HK$2 from a peak of HK$4, because of the financial turmoil and sales pressure, Hsuan said. But he reassured his employees in an open letter on the company's website that TPV was operating on a sound track and that it was possible that it could maintain a gross profit margin of more than 5 percent this year.