Terry Tai-Ming Gou, sometimes written as Terry Guo, (traditional Chinese: 郭台銘; simplified Chinese: 郭台铭; pinyin: Guō Táimíng) (born October 8, 1950) is a Taiwanese tycoon who leads Hon Hai Precision, a company that manufactures electronics on contract for other companies. It is now the largest such electronics manufacturing services company in the world, with factories in several countries, mostly in Mainland China, where it employs 800,000 people and is its largest exporter.[1]
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Gou founded Hon Hai in Taiwan in 1974 with ten workers to make plastic parts for television sets. In 1988 he opened his first factory in Mainland China, in Shenzhen, where his largest factory remains today. He now owns 30% of the public company and was ranked 179th on Forbes magazine's 2011 list of the world's richest people, with a net worth of US$5.7 billion.[2]
Gou's parents lived in mainland China's Shanxi Province before they fled to Taiwan in 1949,[3] where Gou was born. Gou has two younger brothers, Tai-Chiang Gou and Tai-Cheng Gou; both of them later become successful businessmen as well. Gou and his first wife, Serena Lin (Chinese: 林淑如; pinyin: Lín Shúrú, 1950–2005), have a son (born 1976) who works in the film industry and a daughter (born 1978) who worked in the financial sector. Gou founded an educational charity organization with Lin in 2000 and intends to eventually give away one third of his wealth to charity.[1] After her mother passed away, she quit her job and operated the charity organization.
In 2005, Serena Lin died of breast cancer at the age of 55. Gou's younger brother, Tai-Cheng Guo, died in 2007 of leukemia in Beijing. Gou married his second wife, choreographer Delia Tseng (traditional Chinese: 曾馨瑩; simplified Chinese: 曾馨莹; pinyin: Zēng Xīnyíng, born 1974) on July 26, 2008.[4] Tseng and Gou have two children, a daughter (born April 30, 2009) and a son (born November 19, 2010).
In 2007 court documents were revealed showing that he had been blackmailed by a woman who, in 1992, secretly shot a video of them having sexual intercourse during an affair.[5]
In 2002 he bought a Roztěž castle near Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic for $30 million.