Taiwan Stock Exchange Brand Guidelines: Taipei 1961, the TAIEX and a Home in Taipei 101

A 1961 company, opened in 1962.

The Taiwan Stock Exchange, the TWSE, is Taiwan’s main securities exchange and is headquartered in Taipei 101, the Taipei skyscraper, according to English and Chinese Wikipedia. Its origins lie in land reform. Chinese Wikipedia says that in January 1953 the government issued land bonds, together with shares in four public enterprises — Taiwan Cement, Taiwan Paper, Taiwan Agriculture and Forestry, and Taiwan Industrial and Mining — to landowners as compensation for land taken under the land-to-the-tiller policy. Brokers sprang up to trade them, but dealing was scattered and hard to supervise, and the case for a central exchange followed.

From 1958 officials studied the securities markets of the United States and Japan, and American advisers were invited to Taiwan, Chinese Wikipedia says. On 14 April 1960 the Executive Yuan decided that the exchange should be organised as a company, open to investment from private financial firms. The exchange’s own timeline records that on 23 October 1961 Taiwan’s first regulated exchange came into existence under the name The Taiwan Stock Exchange; Chinese Wikipedia says the promoters’ meeting that day approved its articles of incorporation and elected directors and supervisors. It opened for business on 9 February 1962.

The market began small. Focus Taiwan, the English service of the Central News Agency, reported in May 2016, citing the exchange, that the main board had grown from seven listed companies in 1962 to 900 in the 54 years since. In 1972, Chinese Wikipedia says, the exchange moved into the Chengzhong Building on Yanping South Road, facing Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall. English Wikipedia counts 1,085 listed companies as of September 2026, and says the exchange is regulated by the Financial Supervisory Commission.

Computers, indexes and funds.

The TWSE mechanised in stages. Its timeline records electronic clearing and settlement from 1 September 1976, the move of all stock trading to the semi-automated Computer-Assisted Trading System on 29 September 1988, and the switch of listed stocks to the Fully Automated Securities Trading system on 2 August 1993, the day a real-time market-surveillance system also went live. A remote backup centre followed in February 2008, and Chinese Wikipedia says the exchange signed a memorandum with Chunghwa Telecom that month for a new computer centre, which opened in January 2016.

The exchange’s headline number is the TAIEX, the Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization Weighted Stock Index. English Wikipedia says it was first published in 1967, with 1966 as its base year at a value of 100, and that it covers listed stocks apart from preferred shares, full-delivery stocks and listings less than a month old. The same article describes a bubble from 1986 to 1990: from about 1,000 points in 1986 the index passed 12,000 in February 1990, then fell to around 2,500 by October. At the exchange’s 60th-anniversary ceremony at Taipei 101 in February 2021, the Taipei Times reported, the chairman said the market was healthier than in 1990, when listed companies were mostly traditional and financial businesses and technology made up 2 percent; by 2021 electronics accounted for 67 percent.

Other products came through the 2000s. The timeline lists the TWSE FTSE Taiwan 50 Index, co-compiled with FTSE, in October 2002; the licensing of that index for Taiwan’s first exchange-traded fund in June 2003; the first foreign company listing, the American firm Integrated Memory Logic, in May 2010; and the Formosa Index, launched with the Taipei Exchange, in May 2014. The daily price limit was widened from 7 to 10 percent in June 2015.

How exchanges present themselves.

Stock exchanges sell something that cannot be held: access to a market. Most of their public image is therefore built from rituals, rooms and numbers rather than products. One common ritual is the ceremony around the opening or closing of trading. Borsa İstanbul, for example, says it announces the start and end of each session by ringing a bell symbolically, offers bell-ringing ceremonies to listed companies and other organisations, and hands guests a crystal gong hammer as a keepsake.

Rooms come next. Older exchanges often began in borrowed spaces: the Shanghai Stock Exchange reopened in 1990 in the ballroom of a hotel on the Bund before moving to a purpose-built tower in Pudong. Exchanges also show off their trading floors and technology: Borsa İstanbul lists a renewed trading floor and a primary data centre among its milestones. Exchange buildings themselves, from façades to statues at the entrance, become part of the identity.

Numbers carry the rest. Index names such as the SSE Composite or the BIST 100 work as brands in their own right, quoted daily in news reports and printed on tickers and screens. Listing ceremonies supply the backdrops that newly listed companies use in their own announcements, and cross-border links such as Stock Connect give exchanges a story to tell about reach.

Exchanges also publish a great deal: annual and integrated reports, investor-education material and milestone timelines. This guide uses those documents alongside independent dated sources, and marks clearly where a fact rests only on the exchange’s own account. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, not the exchanges’ own marks.

A second board and a carbon exchange.

Recent changes have focused on new companies and disclosure. The exchange set up a Corporate Governance Center on 25 October 2013, its timeline says, and in July 2021 it launched the Taiwan Innovation Board for companies with key technologies, innovative capabilities or innovative business models; the Taipei Times reported in February 2021 that the regulator had approved the board the previous year. English Wikipedia says that in 2025 the board dropped its restriction to qualified investors and its stocks became eligible for day trading.

In January 2016 the exchange set up an index subsidiary, Taiwan Index Plus Corporation, and from December that year it worked with FTSE Russell on the FTSE TWSE Taiwan Index Series, English Wikipedia says. In May 2023, with the National Development Fund, it set up the Taiwan Carbon Solution Exchange, which opened on 7 August 2023. Since 2024 its Power Up Plan has encouraged listed companies to set out mid- to long-term strategies, and a second version launched in October 2026 allowed eligible companies to disclose forecast information for the first time.

Internationally, the TWSE was a founding member of the East Asian Oceanian Stock Exchanges Federation in May 1982 and became the 29th member of the Fédération Internationale des Bourses de Valeurs, now the World Federation of Exchanges, in October 1989, its timeline records; in October 2012 it hosted the federation’s 52nd annual meeting. It is a separate body from the Taipei Exchange, the over-the-counter market with which it co-compiles the Formosa Index.

For a design guide, the Taiwan Stock Exchange shows an exchange whose public story runs through dates, an index and an address in Taipei 101. Compare it with the Japan Exchange Group and Korea Exchange guides. For this guide we use a harbour navy, mist and vermilion with a precise sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Taiwan Stock Exchange’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.