TAIWANESE TYCOON

Terry Gou (Chinese: 郭 台 銘; pinyin: Guō Táimíng; born 8 October 1950) is a Taiwanese tycoon who is the founder and chairman of Foxconn, the world's largest contract manufacturer of electronics, most in mainland China where it employs 1.2 million people and is its largest private employer and exporter.

Gou was born in Banqiao Township, Taipei (now Banqiao District, New Taipei). His parents lived in mainland China's Shanxi Province before the Chinese Civil War and fled to Taiwan in 1949. 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.

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 uninvited into many companies and was able to get extra 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 significantly increased in scale when Gou vertically integrated the 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 bass chassis for other high-profile customers, including HP, IBM, and Apple. Within a few years, Foxconn grew into a consumer electronics giant.

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

Gou is also the main owner of HMD Global, which is founded in 2016 to sell Nokia branded phones. HMD buys the R & D, manufacturing and distribution from FIH Ltd, which is part of Hon Hai group.

Gou drew controversy when he made a board meeting about the 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.