Estimating the Market Potential of PortableFuel Cell Industry in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Yu-Chieh Chen, 陳郁潔
• Other Authors: Shih-Mo Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/51974258248891956335

碩士 === 中原大學 === 國際貿易研究所 === 97 === Limited energy supply and global warming problems together have resulted in the surges of alternative energy development in recent years. Fuel cells, which have been characterized as having high energy transfer efficiency, low pollution, low noise…and so on, have become a potentially important source of energy for portable 3C products. This study aims to explore the market potential of Taiwan’s portable fuel cell industry. The lack of historical data on fuel cells, however, has prevented us from estimating the necessary parameter values needed in projecting the output of fuel cell industry directly. To accommodate this, we chose to estimate the parameter values for lithium battery industry, as well as to estimate most of the parameters for Japanese industries instead of Taiwanese ones. Basically, we estimated the learning elasticities of lithium battery products at different phases of product development, the substitution elasticities of lithium battery products between different phases of product development, the future movement of lithium battery and fuel cell production for Japan, the future demand of major portable 3C products for Taiwan, and the price ratio of fuel cell to lithium battery. With all these estimates, we were able to estimate the amount of lithium battery demand and the proportion of which could be substituted by fuel cells in the years to come. Our results show that the learning elasticity of the lithium battery industry is between -0.0583 and -0.427 for Taiwan, and is between -0.685 and -1.08 for the Japanese ones. As to the substitution elasticities, the estimated value between any two products at different phases of product development is between 1.28 and 2.46. The resulted estimates of the amount of fuel cell that will substitute lithium battery show an increasing trend and would have the chance to surpass lithium battery in year 2014-2015.