Terry Gou

Terry Gou's mother gave him NT$200,000 as a wedding gift. He spent half of it on the wedding and half on plastic injection-molding machines, and in February 1974 opened a company in a rented shed in Tucheng making channel-changer knobs for black-and-white televisions.¹

Gou is the founder of Foxconn, formally Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., the world's largest electronics contract manufacturer. Foxconn assembles the iPhone, iPad, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch along with a large share of the world's consumer electronics for clients including Apple, HP, and Dell, under a model often called manufacturing-as-a-service. Gou built the company over four decades and stepped away from its operating and board roles between 2019 and 2023.

Background

Gou was born on October 18, 1950, in Banqiao, near Taipei, Taiwan. His father was a Kuomintang police officer from Shanxi province and his mother came from Shandong; the family was among the roughly two million mainlanders who fled to Taiwan with the Nationalists in 1949, arriving with nothing. From ages four to thirteen, his family of six lived in the east wing of Cihui Temple, a temple dedicated to the goddess Mazu, sharing one room and surviving on handouts of powdered milk and flour from U.S. missionaries.¹ He had one older sister and two younger brothers, both of whom also became businessmen.

Gou earned a degree from Taipei University of Marine Technology, working in rubber and pharmaceutical plants to pay for school. He served in the Republic of China Air Force as an anti-aircraft artillery officer, stationed on Kinmen within about two miles of the mainland Chinese coast, and was discharged in 1973.

Getting started

After his discharge, Gou worked briefly as a shipping clerk. Watching Taiwan's export boom convinced him, at around age twenty-three, to start his own business rather than continue in clerical work. His mother gave him NT$200,000 as a wedding gift; he used half to marry his first wife, Serena Lin, and half to buy plastic injection-molding machines.

He founded Hon Hai Plastics Corporation, later Foxconn, on February 20, 1974, in a rented shed in Tucheng, with roughly ten workers and about US$7,500 in capital. The first product was plastic channel-changer knobs for black-and-white televisions, and the first major customer was Admiral TV of Chicago, followed by RCA, Zenith, and Philips. The 1974 oil crisis spiked material costs and his co-founders wanted out; Gou borrowed NT$700,000 from his father-in-law and bought out the company at age twenty-four. A 1980 order for Atari joystick connectors showed the company could move beyond simple plastics into electronic connectors.¹

What he built

In the 1980s, Gou made an unannounced eleven-month sales tour across thirty-two U.S. states in a Lincoln Town Car, cold-calling company headquarters; he reportedly won an IBM order in Raleigh after camping in the lobby for three days.¹ In 1985 he opened a U.S. branch and created the brand name Foxconn, combining "fox" and "connectors." In 1988 he became one of the first Taiwanese businessmen to invest in mainland China, opening a factory in Longhua, Shenzhen, and building an integrated worker ecosystem of dining halls, housing, and medical care rather than a bare factory. That Longhua campus became the plant that assembles the iPhone. A 1996 chassis-manufacturing deal with Compaq triggered explosive scale-up, followed by HP, IBM, and later Apple as customers.²

Under Gou's leadership, Foxconn grew into the world's largest electronics manufacturing services company. Its 2025 revenue reached roughly NT$8.1 trillion, about US$259 billion, and it ranked 20th on the 2023 Fortune Global 500. At its peak it manufactured an estimated 40 percent of the world's consumer electronics and employed over one million workers globally.² After Gou's departure, under chairman Young Liu, the company expanded into semiconductors, electric vehicles, AI, and robotics, including the Foxtron joint venture and the MIH open EV-platform alliance.

How he operates

Gou has summarized his outlook with the line "Growth, your name is pain." He deliberately hired people he described as having "no way out," believing that those with nothing to fall back on work hardest and stay most loyal, an approach he traced to his own refugee childhood.³ He took a nominal official salary of NT$1, about three cents, and reportedly worked sixteen-hour days, rarely taking more than three consecutive days off. During the industry's boom years he reinvested aggressively in tooling and molds rather than in real-estate speculation common among peers, favoring vertical integration and process depth over patents. He cites Genghis Khan as a personal hero, wears a beaded bracelet from a Genghis Khan temple, and named the company philosophy "tiger's power, fox's cunning." He moved the same manufacturing-scale playbook across connectors, PCs, phones, and later electric vehicles, entering new categories without claiming deep expertise in any one. Gou has said, "I learned a lot from the American system. It's so open: if you work smart and hard, you will be successful."³

Where things stand

Gou stepped down as chairman and president of Foxconn effective July 1, 2019, succeeded by Young Liu, and resigned from the board on September 2, 2023. He retains a major shareholding and continues business and philanthropic ventures, including biotech investment in Eirgenix. He sought the Taiwan presidency twice: he finished second in the 2019 KMT primary with 27.7 percent before withdrawing, and launched an independent bid in 2023 that he withdrew in November of that year.³ He remarried in 2008 to choreographer Delia Tseng and has committed to donating roughly 90 percent of his fortune to philanthropy. Foxconn remains the dominant global EMS player and Apple's largest assembler, now scaling AI-server and EV manufacturing.

Key facts

• Grew up from ages four to thirteen in a Taiwanese goddess temple, living on U.S. missionary food handouts, after his refugee family fled mainland China in 1949.
• Capitalized Foxconn in 1974 with half of a wedding gift from his mother plus a later NT$700,000 loan from his father-in-law to buy out co-founders during the oil crisis.
• Spent eleven months driving a Lincoln Town Car through thirty-two U.S. states, reportedly winning an IBM order after camping in its lobby for three days.
• In 1988 was one of the first Taiwanese businessmen to invest in mainland China; the Shenzhen site became the plant that assembles the iPhone.
• Took a nominal official salary of NT$1 while running a company that grew to roughly US$259 billion in annual revenue.
• Ran for Taiwan's presidency twice, in 2019 and 2023, withdrawing before the general election both times.