Workers are seen at a workshop in Longhua science and technology park of Foxconn Technology Group in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong Province, Feb 22, 2019. (Xinhua/Mao Siqian)

Business representatives from the island of Taiwan and the Chinese mainland said the island leader's claim that Taiwan companies are leaving the mainland is a "hoax". 

It seems the Taiwan authorities aspire to decouple from the Chinese mainland to echo a decoupling drive by the US Trump administration. 

Henry Tho Kee-ping, chairman of Giant Kunshan Light Metal Technology Co, told the Global Times in a recent interview that claims that many Taiwan-based enterprises were moving out of the mainland were just a political lie made by the Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan.

Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen claimed at the end of 2019 that Taiwan companies investing in the mainland were leaving and coming back to the island. She even claimed NT$700 billion ($23 billion) investment by Taiwan companies was leaving. Her claim was soon denied by the island's economic affairs department which said the amount of investment leaving the mainland was "zero", according to Taiwan local media.

It's impossible for Taiwan companies to move back to the island or Southeast Asian countries just because the mainland market is huge, analysts say.

As global supply chains reshuffle, some Taiwan companies could move to divest some of their assets in the mainland.

Taiwan-based Catcher Technology, a supplier to Apple Inc, said in a filing Tuesday that it agreed to sell two units in the Chinese mainland to Hunan Province-based Lens Technology Co for $1.43 billion.

Last month, Wistron, an iPhone assembler, agreed to sell two of its factories in the mainland to fast-growing Chinese manufacturer Luxshare Precision Industry Co for 3.3 billion yuan ($477 million).

However, a complete withdrawal of Taiwan companies  from the mainland market is untrue, industry observers told the Global Times Wednesday.

Wu Jiaying, chairman of the Taiwan Businessmen's Association in Xiamen, Fujian Province, said that a tiny number of Taiwan companies are considering moving out of the mainland to other markets. "But that is not the trend and cannot truly reflect the whole picture, which is, more firms from Taiwan are investing more in the mainland".

Data from the Taiwan Businessmen's Association in Xiamen showed that in the January-July period, incremental investment from Taiwan companies increased 48.6 percent year-on-year to reach 13 billion yuan.

"A few optoelectronics enterprises have visited the association to seek investment opportunities in Xiamen and Zhanjiang [South China's Guangdong Province]," said Wu.

Compared with immature Southeast Asian manufacturing markets, the mainland still represents an ideal place for Taiwan companies thanks to the hard-working and skilled labor force, relatively inexpensive land cost and efficient management in the mainland, according to Wu.

According to official data in July, Taiwan Island's non-financial foreign direct investment (FDI) in the mainland dropped 54 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of the year to $510 million, because of the Covid-19 outbreak. Cumulative investment from the island accounted for 3.2 percent of the mainland's total FDI as of March 2020, with a total value hitting $69.66 billion.