A Tribute to a "Quietly Brilliant" Woman in Business; Cher Wang (Wang Hsiueh-Hong) of Taiwan's HTC and VIA ...
Ms. Wang is one of the most powerful female executives in technology whom you have never heard of. ...
... unless of course you have followed the evolution of the PDA, Smartphone, and Mobile Wireless IC markets. Ms. Wang is a co-founder and the chairperson of the HTC Corporation and VIA Technologies and she ranks at the very top of my shortlist of exceptionally gifted and successful women in business. She is relatively unheard of outside of the tech industry because she prefers it that way. She lets HTC co-founder, Peter Chou take the HTC forefront at HTC where he is CEO but manages key relationships with strategic partners herself. Cher Wang is married to Wen Chi Chen who is also the CEO and public face of VIA Technologies which she cofounded.
While HTC utilizes the Android OS in the majority of their smartphones today, Cher Wangs ties to Microsoft go way back. HTC's 1st product was Compaq's iPaq PDA which utilized Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS, and HTC also manufactured Palm's Windows Mobile (as well as Palm OS) based Treos. HTC also has close ties to Qualcomm whose 1st 32-bit MSM based integrated ASSPs powered HTCs smartphones.
>> Cher Wang Biography
by lia
Biography
June 23, 2012
sharequotes.us
Do you think you ever heard that name before? Probably not. But do you know that she has her own multibillion-dollar company?
Cher Wang’s name is probably not as famous as Bill Gates or the late Steve Jobs, but this woman founded a company that shares one sixth of smart phone sales in the world. She is the co-founder and chairperson of HTC Corporation, a worldwide smart phone producer, and VIA technologies.
Cher Wang was born as Wang Hsiueh-Hong, a name she still uses in her native Taiwan, on September 14, 1958 in Taiwan to a rich technology dynasty. Her father, Wang Yung-Ching, was the founder of Formosa Plastics Group and placed as the second richest man in Taiwan according to Forbes magazine. Her sisters helped with the family company as they should be. But the fate brought Cher Wang to end up building her own company in the Silicon Valley.
As her sisters, Cher Wang was offered a chance to study abroad since her childhood. While her most of her sisters chose London, Wang preferred California. Therefore, she ended up attended College Preparatory School in Oakland in 1974. Graduated from the prep school, she went to Berkeley and initially studied music since she wanted to be a pianist. But her adviser thought otherwise and finally she was admitted into economics.
From there, her career in technology world started. She got herself a job of selling motherboards in 1982. She later co-founded VIA in 1987 with her husband and then HTC in 1997. Wang made the crucial decision of switching HTC’s focus to hand held gadget from notebook computer.
Cher Wang is married to Wen Chi Chen who is also the CEO of VIA Technologies, a company Wang co-founded back in 1987. ###
>> HTC's Billionaire Chair Cher Wang Leads The Battle Vs. Apple
Wu Linfei (Editor)
All China Women's Federation | Business Women in China
Beijing Time
September 20, 2012
womenofchina.cn
Cher Wang would rather not be pigeonholed as a billionaire (which she is). She'd rather talk about the other thing she is: one of technology's most powerful executives, certainly the most influential woman in wireless. Sure, she and her husband, Wenchi Chen, are worth $6.8 billion as of our last count, making them the wealthiest couple in Taiwan. Her late father was a billionaire, too. When we first tried to sit down with Wang, the chairman and cofounder of the Taiwan mobile giant HTC, for a profile for the FORBES billionaires issue, she demurred. Too much focus on money and not enough on business. So our first face-to-face meeting with Wang, in July, more than six months in the planning, was all business.
She chose the spot, the Faculty Club at the University of California, Berkeley, her favorite neutral ground. I walked into the room and hadn't turned on the recorder yet when Wang stood up to greet me, laughed in a throaty Lauren Bacall voice, pointed at the iPhone in my hand and said, "You've got the wrong smartphone."
In a clear sign of their growing rivalry, Apple and HTC have been suing each other for patent infringement in courts around the world. In some respects HTC is proxy for Apple's competition with Google's Android operating system software; Apple has also been wrangling with Samsung over similar issues. HTC lost the most recent round, after the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that the iPhone does not violate HTC's patents, although the court found the HTC patents at issue to be valid. HTC's response was that the ITC case was just one step in many proceedings, and that it intends to protect its intellectual property. This is going to be a long, drawn-out war.
HTC's rise to the top ranks of the smartphone sector has been nothing less than astonishing. Just a few years ago the company was a little-known Taiwanese contract manufacturer called High Tech Computer Corp. Now it ranks among the world's largest players in wireless handsets. With a market capitalization of $21 billion, HTC is worth more than Research In Motion ($12 billion) and is just slightly behind Nokia ($23 billion).
While based in Taiwan, HTC does little business in Asia; the company sells half of its phones in the U.S. and another 35% in Europe. HTC sold one of every five smartphones in the U.S. in the second quarter, according to research firm Canalys, which made it the number-two vendor, trailing only Apple at 25%. And HTC continues to gain ground: In September it posted sales of $1.5 billion, up 68% from a year ago. For the third quarter sales were up 9% from the prior quarter and 79% from a year ago, to $4.5 billion. (The company has reported monthly sales only so far, and not full third-quarter results.) It is only now starting to gain some traction in mainland China.
Wang leaves the day-to-day operations to her longtime friend, CEO Peter Chou, an early hire. She spends a lot of time living not in Taiwan but in Silicon Valley and not, by the way, at HTC's U.S. base in Bellevue, Washington, 5 miles down the road from Microsoft headquarters. While there are advantages to Wang being in Silicon Valley, it does raise questions about just how actively engaged she is in the company's operations. Yet there's no doubting her prominence in Asian business. In addition to her role at HTC, she is chairman of Via Technologies, a Taiwan chip company where her husband is CEO; the two were among a small group that built Via in the 1980s from the remains of Symphony, a California maker of core logic chips.
And make no mistake: The vision behind HTC's success is all Cher's. "I confer with him frequently on strategy, directions, acquisitions, major hirings, legal issues, government relationships and risk management," she says of Chou. Wang's vision these days is for HTC to become more than just a phonemaker. It wants to expand the content and experiences available to users of its devices, and to do so it is bulking up its patent portfolio and spending on acquisitions.
HTC in November 2010 cut a licensing agreement for the 30,000-plus patents held by former Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures. In April HTC bought a collection of nearly 100 mobile technology patents and applications from the infrastructure provider ADC Telecom for $75 million. In July HTC agreed to pay $300 million to buy S3 Graphics, a company owned by Via and an investment company controlled by Cher herself that happens to have a portfolio of 235 patents and applications used to render images on cellphones. Among S3's licensees: Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.
While some knocked the deal as being not-quite-arms-length, HTC has good reason to own S3. On July 1 the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that Apple infringed two S3 patents related to compressing images and image data formats. Coincidence? Uh, no. Google in September handed over nine of its patents to HTC for use in an ongoing series of patent battles with Apple.
While the legal skirmishes go on, HTC's longer-term plan is to distinguish itself in the handset market by offering an HTC-specific experience on both Android and Windows phones. It starts with a piece of software called HTC Sense that sits on top of the operating system and provides considerable fit and finish to the phones. Ergo, the weather app on the HTC phone includes lifelike animated graphics; when it is raining outside, digital water droplets appear on your phone's screen. Thunderstorms bring animated lightning displays. You can silence a ringing HTC phone simply by turning it over. To make it easier to find your phone buried inside a pocketbook or backpack, the phone rings louder when in the dark, then quiets when pulled into the light. Integrate your phone with your social networks, and a phone call from a friend will pop up his latest status update. If it happens to be your pal's birthday, you'll know it at the first ring.
HTC wants to involve itself in experiences outside of the phone. In early 2010 HTC invested $40 million in OnLive, a startup founded by WebTV inventor Steve Perlman that hosts network-based versions of multiplayer video-console games. While OnLive's software so far has been targeted largely at PCs with fast Internet connections, the service is likely to spread to mobile devices as 4G access becomes more ubiquitous in 2012 and beyond. At some point HTC sees its devices becoming a gaming platform. Asked when OnLive might debut on HTC phones, Wang would say only that "it's coming, it's coming." More recently the company invested $300 million to take a majority stake in Beats, a headphone company started by rapper Dr. Dre and music producer Jimmy Iovine. The idea behind that deal: that your phone isn't just about making calls, it's about being entertained, which includes having highend audio experiences.
HTC's first entry into the tablet market, the Android-based HTC Flyer, hasn't grabbed much market share, but give credit to HTC for trying to think differently: The 7-inch Flyer includes a stylus, of all things, on the theory that there are applications where you want an alternative for taking notes to using your finger or tapping a keyboard. One cool feature of the Flyer: You can record conversations while taking notes and synch the sound to your notes, making it easier to review your work. HTC Chief Marketing Officer John Wang (no relation) nicely sums up the company's philosophy on the tablet market: to make just one more Android-based tablet that looks like the dozens of others, he says, would hardly be "quietly brilliant" (HTC's slogan).
Cher Wang was born to be in business. Her late father, Y.C. Wang, was the legendary founder of Formosa Plastics, the Taiwanese petrochemical conglomerate that now has about 100,000 employees. A larger-than-life figure who had three wives and nine children, he eventually died intestate--in Short Hills, New Jersey, of all places--as one of Taiwan's richest men.
Her tycoon father shipped Wang to the U.S. when she was just 15 years old to live with her sister Charlene, who at the time was in Los Angeles. Not long after she arrived in the States, her sister decided to move to Detroit to accommodate a job change for her new husband. Rather than drag Wang to Detroit, Charlene found her a slot at the pricey College Preparatory School in Oakland, California. At a meeting ahead of her arrival at CPS, she met an Oakland family that agreed to play host to Wang for over a year; thus it came to pass that Cher Wang, Taiwanese corporate royalty, came to spend her senior year in high school with the family of a Jewish pediatrician in Oakland.
After high school Wang went on to Berkeley, where after a few weeks' flirtation with a career in music--she played piano--Wang shifted gears and studied economics. After finishing her degree she began doing some work for First International Computer, cofounded in 1980 by Charlene and her husband, Ming Chien. Cher did a stretch in the mid-1980s in which she traveled by train around Europe peddling motherboards for FIC. While at FIC Wang launched a PC brand called Leo Computers that never quite took off; she also later led FIC's acquisition of the PC maker Everex. "I always think about branded devices," she says.
During trips she craved some kind of more portable computing device, something she could carry around in a briefcase or pocket. She occasionally mentioned this need to her friend H.T. Cho, who had worked for 11 years for the Taiwan arm of Digital Equipment Corp., also one of her customers. Cho eventually rose to be head of engineering for DEC Taiwan.
In 1997 she was approached by a Microsoft contact who wanted to find manufacturers to build devices based on the Windows CE operating system. I could do that, she said, and persuaded her friend Cho to join her in starting a handheld company. The technology to build a decent handheld computer, of the kind Wang wanted to build, didn't quite exist. So HTC opted to start with something more familiar, laptops, but the effort was a bust. HTC lacked competitive advantage. "We totally wiped out," she says.
HTC moved on to plan B and became a contract manufacturer of PDAs and mobile phones. Its first big win was a 2000 deal to design and produce the Compaq Aero PDA. It was no breakout hit but did lead to more PDA work with Compaq and others, including Palm, and handsets for carriers such as T-Mobile, Orange and O2. G1, Google's first Android phone, was built by HTC.
Wang was getting closer to her dream of making HTC-branded mobiles, a cause she had been pushing for years. "Peter one day asked me, ‘Cher, do you really want to do brand-name phones?' and I said, ‘As quickly as possible,' " she says. Inching toward the goal, the company started by cobranding phones with some of the carrier partners but then shed the double-labeling and shifted focus to HTC's own brand. In the process the company has been aggressively pushing cutting-edge phones. Phones with huge screens. The first 4G phones. The first phones with 3-D displays. And, coming soon, some of the first phones using Windows Phone 8.
They knew the decision would hurt, and the company's stock price fell to half in 2006, not to regain lost ground for another four years, as HTC had to increase investment in manufacturing its own phones while making phones for others. They decided they did not have the engineering talent to both design products for others and for their own products. "For a year things were actually very difficult," she recalls. "A lot of people didn't believe our message."
But starting in 2007, as HTC began rolling out more phones under its own brand, it was able to tap the strong relationships it had built as a contract manufacturer with all four of the big U.S. wireless carriers--an asset Nokia conspicuously lacked. HTC phones are among the best sellers at AT&T, Verizon Wireless,T-Mobile and Sprint.The company has also maintained its strong ties to Microsoft: While best known for Android phones, HTC also sells models based on Windows Phone 7 and will be among the pioneers when Phone 8 debuts next year.
Google's recently announced deal to acquire Motorola Mobility raises some difficult questions for HTC and other Android licensees; assuming Google chooses to keep the Motorola handset business, it will face the delicate business of competing with its own licensees. HTC so far has been supportive of the Motorola deal; the cache of patents at the heart of the deal will help Google protect Android handset-makers from Apple and others claiming patent violations. But Cher recently indicated that the company could at some point decide to buy an operating system of its own, perhaps a signal to Google that it had better watch its step.
Wang admits she is following in her father's footsteps, though she didn't see much of him while she was going to school in Oakland. She confides her father would send her handwritten letters--sometimes as long as 20 pages--giving her advice on life, wealth and business. "He'd write me letters to tell me how he thinks," she says. "How he manages things ... to really be responsible for your wealth to the people around you and to bring value to people. That's something that really affects me. He also told me that you have to find the root of a problem and really dig deep and try to be a perfectionist."
As we left the Berkeley Faculty Club Wang offered to walk me to my car. Just a few parking spots over was a space reserved, half in jest, for Nobel Prize winners. She whipped out her HTC phone, took a picture of the sign and laughed. If they ever start giving out Nobel Prizes for smartphones, you know Cher Wang will be quietly gunning for that parking spot. ###
>> With Smartphones, Cher Wang Made Her Own Fortune
Laura M. Holson
The New York Times
October 26, 2008
nytimes.com
No one is ever going to call Cher Wang “poor little rich girl.”
The daughter of one of the richest men in the world, she never made headlines as a profligate jet setter sponging off her father’s wealth.
Indeed, she rarely makes headlines at all, although she started her own multibillion-dollar company and made her own fortune.
Ms. Wang is one of the most powerful female executives in technology whom you have never heard of. The company she founded, the HTC Corporation, makes one out of every six smartphones sold in the United States, most of which are marketed under brands like Palm and Verizon.
Last week the iPhone’s most likely rival, the T-Mobile G1, designed by HTC and powered by Google’s Android operating system, went on sale. The attention is something HTC has never sought. And the same can be said of Ms. Wang.
“I kind of like it that way,” she said in a rare interview last month as she tucked into a lunch of mahi mahi, spinach and mushrooms at the Faculty Club at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated in 1981. “I don’t need to be the center of attention.”
In her native Taiwan, though, where she is called Wang Hsiueh-Hong, Ms. Wang and her family are a technology dynasty. Her recently deceased father, Wang Yung-Ching, founded the plastics and petrochemicals conglomerate Formosa Plastics Group. According to Forbes magazine, he was the second richest man in Taiwan. Two of his daughters serve on Formosa’s seven-member executive team.
Another daughter, Charlene Wang, helped found First International Computer in 1980, a maker of motherboards. And Cher Wang is chairwoman of not one, but two companies: HTC and VIA Technologies, a developer of silicon chip technology, where her husband, Wen Chi Chen, has been chief executive since 1992.
Forbes estimates the couple’s wealth at $3.5 billion. HTC’s revenue in 2007 reached 118.6 billion Taiwanese dollars, or about $3.7 billion. But Ms. Wang said she was not defined by wealth — either her own or her parents’.
“My family was very strict,” she said. Leisure time was spent playing tennis or basketball. And becoming a lady who lunches was not an option. “My father thought we should experience different things.”
When she was a young girl, Ms. Wang said, her father would take her on monthly visits to a local hospital he helped finance. And at her father’s behest, Ms. Wang and her siblings studied abroad instead of staying in Taipei.
That is how she ended up in Silicon Valley. Ms. Wang was born in Taipei in 1958, one of seven children raised by her father’s second wife. (Altogether Mr. Wang had nine children by three wives.) While some of the other children went to private schools in London, the United States held more appeal for Ms. Wang.
In 1974 she attended the exclusive College Preparatory School in Oakland, Calif. (Her older sister Charlene was living in the Bay Area.) Ms. Wang lived with a local pediatrician and his family. After graduating from high school, she went to Berkeley, where she was admitted as a music major; she wanted to be a pianist. But after three weeks — and a stern talk with her adviser — she switched to economics, in which she later earned a master’s degree.
“This is the building I ran away from,” she said on a walk around campus, pointing to a second-story room at the music school where she had auditioned, playing a piece by Chopin. “I had the dream, but I am also very realistic.”
After graduating from Berkeley, she took a job in 1982 at First International Computer, where she sold motherboards and later oversaw the personal computer division.
When HTC was founded in 1997, the company made notebook computers. Her husband recalled that a few years after the company started, Ms. Wang and her partners were forced to make a choice: focus on notebooks or shift gears to hand-held devices, a market that showed signs of promise. Ms. Wang urged they shift to cellphones.
“HTC had strong engineers developing notebooks,” said Mr. Chen. “But it was a volatile business with lots of competitors. She saw that clearly and pushed for the other instead.”
It was a smart decision. HTC’s revenue tallied about $1 billion in the most recent quarter, a 29 percent increase from a year earlier. “She is very demanding in one sense,” said Mr. Chen. “If she wants something changed, she’ll speak up about it.”
In HTC’s early days Ms. Wang’s responsibility was to build relationships with customers, including wireless carriers, and vendors whose products HTC needed. She spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley. It was then she became close to executives at T-Mobile, which was critical in securing the right to make the first Android-supported phone.
She also managed HTC’s relationship with Microsoft, a longtime partner whose operating system is installed on most HTC phones. Once a year, Ms. Wang said, she flies to Seattle and meets with Bill Gates and Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive.
She keeps her life simple. On her 50th birthday last month, she stayed home and ate strawberry ice cream cake with her family. Despite her status as a member of technology’s billionaire club, she eschews being ferried by private jet from her offices in Taipei to Silicon Valley. And instead of taking business associates out for a lavish dinner, she invites them to an early morning basketball game instead.
Stephen Zelencik, a retired head of sales and marketing for Advanced Micro Devices, has known Ms. Wang since she was a young executive working for First International Computer. But in his encounters with her at HTC, he learned how relentless she could be.
He recalled a particular exhausting negotiation, lasting more than a week in Taipei, when Ms. Wang was holding out for a lower price on a large order of microprocessors HTC wanted to buy from A.M.D.
The two had loosely agreed on a price. But Ms. Wang, sensing an opportunity on the last day, told him she wanted a lower price, tapped her watch and pointed out his plane was leaving at 2 p.m. “She wanted me to relent,,” he said.
Mr. Zelencik said he replied, “ ‘We don’t have to catch the plane.’ Then she said, ‘O.K. We’ll negotiate.’ ” Ultimately, the two agreed to keep the deal as is. “It was negotiated in her favor,” he said. “But she would always give it one more try.”
Faith plays an important part in her life. A Christian (like her husband), she said she belongs to no specific denomination but attends church whenever she can. Spirituality informs how she lives. “I feel everyone has their own faults,” she said. “We have to understand why people are like that — is it the environment or the background.” But it informs her work too. “Jesus also tells us you have to work hard, not be sluggish,” she said.
She shuttles mostly among three cities: she and her husband have a home in Mountain View, Calif. (where one of her two sons lives), a house in Taipei and an apartment in Beijing, which is used mostly for business. While Ms. Wang has stepped away from much of the day-to-day running of HTC, she is still active in the company by meeting clients and negotiating deals. And she remains an arbiter of HTC’s style, a role she relishes.
“All these kids were into something,” said Mr. Zelencik. “They just didn’t sit around and spend the money.”
And Ms. Wang would have it no other way. “I always have this imagination, something I want to use,” she said. “I don’t understand the idea of leisure time.” ###
>> Taiwan's Priestess Of The PDA
Matt Kovac
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
July 10, 2005
businessweek.com
The experiment almost ended in failure. In 1997, Cher Wang, daughter of one of Taiwan's richest men, petrochemicals billionaire Y.C. Wang, launched a design and manufacturing outfit in Taipei with a difference. It aimed to offer what was then a unique product for executives on the go -- a gizmo that was both personal digital assistant and mobile phone.
But the PDA phone failed to capture the corporate world's imagination. In less than two years, High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC) was hemorrhaging cash. "The market just wasn't ready for a PDA phone that behaved like a minicomputer," recalls Wang, HTC's 47-year-old chairman, who concedes that the software and design weren't up to scratch.
But the indomitable businesswoman, who also chairs chip-design house Via Technologies Inc., refused to give in. Instead, she injected millions of dollars of family money -- she won't say exactly how much -- into the company to boost its design and engineering capabilities. The investments paid off. In 2000, Wang's HTC won the contract to make the now hugely successful iPAQ handheld personal computer for Compaq and later for Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), which took over Compaq in 2002. Its reputation as a handset-design house snowballed as carriers such as T-Mobile International and Cingular Wireless (HPQ) came calling. And a key collaboration began with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) on Windows-based technology for mobile phones. Now execs from New York to Shanghai use HTC-designed or manufactured devices.
Despite her rocky start, Wang is a Star because of her persistence in pushing her vision for the company. HTC now boasts a 950-person research and development team. "We are all about R&D and innovation. It's a given that we provide the best," says the economics graduate of University of California at Berkeley. Sales last year jumped 67%, to $1.6 billion, and profits soared 108%, to $123 million. HTC shares, traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, are up 86% since January. Wang's determination could take HTC to new heights. ###
VIA Group, VIA Technologies, and HTC Links ...
• en.wikipedia.org
• via.com.tw
• en.wikipedia.org
• htc.com
- Eric - |
