Tsai Chi-jui (
But Tsai, the son of humble weavers, is rarely seen on the cover of a magazine or even in a business suit. An intensely private man, he kept a low profile yesterday even as one of his companies joined Hong Kong's blue-chip stock index.
Associates of the 65-year-old businessman say you would have a tough time picking him out in a crowd.
His main characteristics -- laughing eyes and a smile that reveals a golden tooth -- belie his strategic mind and clout from Beijing to Taipei, they say.
"If you run into him at work, you'd never think he's the boss," said a senior executive and 25-year veteran of Tsai's Pou Chen Corp (
Described by colleagues as an incurable optimist, Tsai heads the world's biggest manufacturer of branded shoes with a 16 percent global market share. His empire employs a quarter of a million people in factories spanning China, Indonesia, Vietnam and the US.
The family-run Pou Chen is the biggest supplier of sports shoes for the world's top five athletic brands -- Nike Inc, Reebok International Ltd, Adidas-Salomon AG, New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc and Asics Corp.
It also makes casual shoes for Timberland Co, Reebok unit Rockport Co Inc, privately owned Clarks of the United Kingdom and Jones Apparel Group Inc's Easy Spirit.
Like many Taiwanese businessmen who have quietly amassed fortunes by investing in low-cost China, Tsai hobnobs with political and business leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, helping to turn the greater China region into the world's most well-oiled export machine.
It's an industry that has had its share of controversy -- especially after Tsai's Pou Chen got bad press in 1997 over alleged poor working conditions. When a supervisor at its Vietnam plant, which made shoes for Nike, was sentenced to six months jail for physically abusing workers, critics slammed Nike and its contract manufacturers. Pou Chen pledged to do better.
Tsai's empire is once again back into the limelight as his Hong Kong-based Yue Yuen Industrial (Holdings) Ltd with an annual turnover approaching US$2 billion, joined the Hang Seng Index on Monday, cementing its stature among the territory's blue chips.
Tsai started out as a fine arts teacher at a small high school, earning extra income by doing piecework for various factories in the evenings.
Full of creative ideas on how to improve production, Tsai went into business himself in 1969, setting up a factory making rubber shoes in Changhua with three brothers.
The family business prospered in the 1970s, mirroring the rise of Taiwan's export-driven economy, and Pou Chen signed on Adidas as its first big-name client in 1980.
The deal gave the firm the international exposure that soon brought in other multinational athletic wear companies.
Faced with rising labor costs and an appreciating Taiwan dollar, Pou Chen's exports started to lose their competitive edge so Tsai began to move his factories to China in 1988 -- among the first wave of Taiwanese investment there.
"Tsai Chi-jui sees problems in a three to five-year timeframe and is a real strategist," said the senior executive, who declined to be identified.
At weekly brainstorming strategy meetings, the biggest and most ambitious ideas always come from Tsai, he said.
In recent years, Tsai has folded most of his shoe business into Yue Yuen and steered Pou Chen into the high-tech industry, producing PC components, motherboards and integrated circuit (IC) design. Tsai has also invested in a bank in China.
While critics say Pou Chen is late in entering the electronics sector, Tsai pays them no heed. Many had labelled the shoe business as a sunset industry before Pou Chen turned it around, he said in a rare interview with the local Win-Win Weekly (
"Pou Chen cannot depend only on Yue Yuen for growth, so we have to plan technology investments one by one, wait for them to be profitable for six months before absorbing them into Pou Chen," the magazine quoted Tsai as saying in late November.
Pou Chen's first-quarter profit nearly tripled to NT$3.18 billion (US$92 million), even as the economy struggles to recover from its worst ever recession in 2001.
Tsai's personal assistant, Alvin Hu, credits his boss' success to a modest style, mild manner and willingness to swallow unfavorable terms when negotiating with new business partners.
"He told me once: Only people with big stomachs have good fortunes," said Hu, quoting a common Taiwanese saying.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS