Terry Gou

Early life

Gou was born in Banqiao Township, Taipei County (now Banqiao District, New Taipei). His parents lived on mainland China's Shanxi Province before they fled to Taiwan in 1949, where Gou was born. His father was a career police officer. As the first child of his family, Gou received education from elementary school to post college. After graduation, he continued to work in a rubber factory, working at a grinding wheel, and medicine plant until the age of 24. Gou has two younger brothers, Tai-Chiang Guo and Tony Guo, who have both become successful businessmen as well.

Hon Hai

Terry Gou founded Hon Hai in Taiwan in 1974 with $7,500 in startup money and ten elderly workers, making plastic parts for television sets in a rented shed in Tucheng, a suburb of Taipei. A turning point came in 1980 when he received an order from Atari to make the console joystick. He further expanded his business in the 1980s by embarking on an 11-month trip across the US in search of customers. As an aggressive salesman, Gou broke in uninvited into many companies and was able to get additional orders, despite having security called on him multiple times.

In 1988 he opened his first factory in mainland China, in Shenzhen, where his largest factory remains today. Operations in China took on a mammoth dimension when Gou vertically integrated the assembly process and facilities for workers. The manufacturing site became a campus that included housing, dining, medical care and burial for the workers, and even chicken farming to replenish the cafeteria.

In 1996, Hon Hai started building chassis for Compaq desktops. This was a breakthrough moment that led to building the bare bones chassis for other high-profile customers, including HP, IBM, and Apple. Within just a few years, Foxconn grew into a consumer electronics giant.

In 2016, Gou was worth US$5.6 billion. By August 2017, Forbes listed his net worth at $10.6 billion.

Gou drew controversy when comments he made during a board meeting about employees were translated into English as "Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache." Through Foxconn, Gou would protest that the translation was poor and took his comments out of context.

Political stances

In the 2012 Taiwanese presidential election, Gou endorsed Ma Ying-jeou, stating that Ma was an "experienced, outstanding helmsman." After Donald Trump won the 2016 United States presidential election, Gou was the subject of a spoof open letter in Bloomberg, in which author Tim Culpan was severely critical of Trump. The article was mistakenly reported as having been written by Gou himself. Earlier that year, it was widely reported that Gou was considering a 2020 Taiwanese presidential bid, and such speculation continued into 2017.

Personal life

Gou and his first wife, Serena Lin (林淑如; Lín Shúrú; 1950–2005), have a son who works in the film and real estate industries and a daughter who worked in the financial sector. Gou founded an educational charity with Lin in 2000 and intends to eventually give away one third of his wealth to charity. After her mother died, Gou's daughter assumed leadership her mother's charity.

In 2002 he bought a Roztěž castle near Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic for $30 million.

In 2005, Serena Lin died of breast cancer at the age of 55. Gou's younger brother, Tony Guo, died in 2007 of leukemia. Also that year, Hsu Ching-wei accused Gou of having an affair during the 1990s. Gou married his second wife, choreographer Delia Tseng (曾馨瑩; Zēng Xīnyíng; born 1974) on July 26, 2008. Tseng and Gou have three children. Together, they have decided to give 90% of Gou's wealth away.