The board asked the wrong question
Most Taiwan entry plans I see are built to answer one question: should we do Taiwan? It is the question the board asked, so it is the question the deck answers, usually with market size, growth rate and a competitor map.
The market does not ask that question back. It asks five others, and a plan that has not answered them will stall regardless of how attractive the opportunity looked.
One: are we selling into Taiwan, or sourcing from it?
Taiwan is two opportunities wearing one name. It is a wealthy domestic market of some 23 million people who pay for imported food, drink and design, and it is the densest hardware supply chain on earth.
Companies arrive wanting one and discover the other, usually halfway through an engagement, at which point the partner shortlist they have been building is the wrong shortlist. Decide first. The answer changes the region you work in, the people you meet and the structure you need.
Two: who has to hold our registrations, and can we take them back?
This is the question that separates entries that can be corrected from entries that cannot. In regulated categories somebody local must hold the registration or certification, and whoever holds it holds your right to sell.
If that is also the company selling your product, changing distributor means re-establishing your legal access to the market. The roles can be separated at the start for very little. Unwinding them later takes a year you will not get back.
Three: which certification decides the calendar?
Every category has one item that sets the critical path, and it is rarely the one people plan around. For electrical goods it is usually BSMI: a certificate valid three years, extendable once. For food it is the inspection filing and, in announced categories, a permit.
Find the long pole before you commit to a launch date, not after the artwork is printed.
Four: which region are we actually entering?
Taiwan is 394 kilometres long and behaves like several markets stacked on each other. The decision gets made in Taipei. The specification gets written in Hsinchu. The component chain runs through Taichung. Advanced packaging and heavy industry sit in the south.
"Taiwan" as a territory on a plan is not a place you can go. Name the region and the plan becomes executable.
Five: what happens in the weeks after the good meeting?
Almost every entry I have watched fail did not fail at the strategy stage. It failed in the quiet weeks after a promising first meeting, when nobody owned the follow-up, the documentation was still in English, and the enthusiasm on the Taiwanese side had no internal champion to sustain it.
Budget for that stretch explicitly. It is the part of the work that decides whether anything you paid for turns into revenue.