At the beginning of August, Taipei hosted Creative Expo Taiwan, organised by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture together with the Taiwan Design Research Institute — one of the region’s flagship platforms for cultural and creative industries, drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands over the course of the fair.

Moreover, Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) was in charge of an international delegation attending this event, and I was excited to be part of it. Among the international delegations on the show floor, besides my presence, only one other European was in attendance: Hugo Sallé, IP & Corporate Communications Manager at Media Participations. Over several days immersed in the Taiwanese market, I spoke with Sallé, and his observations offer a genuinely useful outside-in perspective on an ecosystem that looks and behaves very differently from the licensing and animation businesses we know in Europe.

The first thing that strikes any European visitor to Creative Expo Taiwan is the speed. Where Western IP development tends to move through years of narrative-building before a single product reaches shelves, Taiwan’s creators go straight to market. As Sallé put it, “there seems to be a very direct business approach where the creator or small company creates a brand and then does merchandise very quickly… It’s very impressive to see how they can quickly jump into concrete things.” Despite the scale, Taiwan’s IP landscape is not, in fact, dominated by large corporations. “There are still very small companies, some creators, independent creators that do everything themselves,” Sallé observed. “There aren’t a lot of big IP owners. It’s sometimes people who started on YouTube and then created the IP, or just people who posted illustrations on social media.”

This direct-to-market instinct goes hand in hand with a different relationship to storytelling. The sharpest contrast with Western practice concerns narrative itself: in Europe and the US, a compelling story is treated as a prerequisite for building an audience, while in Taiwan it isn’t. “Here the story is not essential,” Sallé said. “It’s kind of essential in Europe and in the US to create a reason for people to care about the character, but here you don’t need that.” What replaces it is appeal through design and a deliberately broad audience.

Despite these differences in approach, there is common ground, particularly in books with educational roots that are migrating into entertainment. “Several creators and IP owners… already have books that deal with universal themes and values,” he noted, adding that this could translate into straightforward licensing deals for children’s publishing, and European publishers are invited to scout new content in this region. Where Taiwan has less of a track record is long-form TV series animation, and Sallé sees this as the natural next step for collaboration: “not a lot of IPs have long-form animation,” and this could be a basis for partnerships, with European animation studios handling content and production development for short series developed in this region. Of course, this won’t mean turning every promising property into a series, but the appetite on the Taiwanese side is real, supported, as in Europe, by public funding bodies.

One structural difference stood out as almost impossible to imagine at home: the sheer range of companies willing to build with IP owners, no matter how small the team behind the property. “In Japan, in China also, all the transportation companies are studying IP for collaborations a lot,” he said. “And that never happens in Europe.” Underneath the speed and the collaborations is a different theory of how fandom is built in the first place. In Taiwan, as in Korea, Japan and China more broadly, creators tend to build community first, with next to no budget, and only then move into merchandise and partnerships. Europe’s model runs the other way, starting from budget and asking how to manufacture fandom afterward. It’s a gap Sallé is candid about on the funding side too: traditional broadcasters remain, in his view, the only reliable way to finance animation at scale, at least from a European perspective, “because they have the money, and you don’t have money from YouTube to finance a show”, even as digital platforms increasingly are the main broadcaster in much of the Western world.

Despite a digital landscape that, in theory, makes every market instantly reachable, Sallé was clear that proximity and trust still determine outcomes. He pointed to the European webtoon boom-and-bust of a few years ago, when Korean companies invested heavily in France only to retreat once it became clear the market wasn’t yet mature, “a matter of timing,” as he called it. Having a local partner is still crucial, alongside a genuine investment in the experiential side of fandom, from live events to theme parks.

Asked what advice he’d give European professionals back home, Sallé’s answer was simple, and arguably the point of the whole trip: get on a plane. “To go to those places, to see with your own eyes what’s going on,” he said, “it’s also about understanding the phenomenon on site, but as well as understanding the working culture.” If Taiwan’s IP ecosystem has a lesson to offer Europe, it may be less about any single property waiting to be licensed than about a different relationship between creators, audiences, and speed. Something that’s easier to feel on the ground in Taipei than to read about from a desk in Paris or Milan.