Terry Gou: the fiery gadget chief guns for top job

944-Gou-634 — Gou: fierce, but with great foresight

"The man who made your iPhone wants to run Taiwan," says The New York Times and all, apparently, because of a sea goddess. The mercurial founder of electronics giant Foxconn has thrown his hat into the country's presidential race, claiming that the Chinese sea goddess Mazu encouraged him to "come forward", all the better to support "peace" across the Taiwan Strait.

Terry Gou, 68, is a huge employer in China, having built his $41bn empire assembling gadgets for Apple, Sony and many others in vast factories spread like "mini-cities" across the country. Renowned for his hard-driving ethos, he hit the headlines in 2010 when more than a dozen Foxconn workers committed suicide, says Bloomberg. In America, where Foxconn is also a big employer, Gou has built a strong rapport with President Trump.

Quite how that will survive him representing Taiwan's "China-friendly" Kuomintang (KMT) party in next year's election remains to be seen. Far from bringing "peace", Gou's intervention has raised the temperature in the debate about Taiwan's "fragile relations" with both countries.

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Disruption is a speciality

Disruption has always been a Gou speciality. The son of a policeman from the mainland province of Shanxi, who fled Mao's communists in 1949, "his is a true rags-to-riches tale". After cutting his teeth as a shipping clerk, Gou struck out alone aged 23 with a $7,500 loan from his mother and, in 1974, began making plastic knobs for TV sets. "To drum up more business, he went on an 11-month tour of the US in the early 1980s, dropping in on companies unannounced, like a door-to-door salesman," notes Bloomberg. The tactic worked.

Foxconn rode Taiwan's export-driven boom, tirelessly expanding into game consoles, personal computers and smartphones, "squeezing out sometimes formidable incumbents in those sectors", says the FT. Gou's "fierce personality" helped, but so did his foresight. His pairing of American demand for gadgets with cheap Asian labour was decisive, says Bloomberg. Many manufacturers hesitated to move production to the mainland when it opened up in the 1980s, but Gou acted quickly he set up his first plant in Shenzhen in 1988,the year Beijing promisednot to nationalise Taiwanese investments.

Make Taiwan great again

Many Taiwanese may be open to the ideaof a businessman running the country, says the FT. But just as many view Gou as a potential threat to democracy. The 2020 election promises to be interesting.

Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.