Terry Gou (; born 18 October 1950) is a Taiwanese billionaire businessman who is the Founder and former chairman and chief executive officer of Foxconn. Foxconn is the world's largest contract manufacturer of electronics, with factories in several countries, mostly in mainland China where it employs 1.2 million people and is its largest private employer and exporter. Early life Gou was born in Banqiao Township, Taipei County (now Banqiao District, New Taipei). His parents lived in mainland China's Shanxi Province before the Chinese Civil War and fled to Taiwan in 1949. As the second child of his family, Gou received education from elementary school to post college. After graduation, he continued to work in a rubber factory, working at a grinding wheel, and medicine plant until the age of 24. Gou has an older sister and two younger brothers, Gou Tai-chiang and Tony Gou, who have both become successful businesspeople as well. Hon Hai Terry Gou founded Hon Hai in Taiwan in 1974 with $7,500 ($44,000 in 2021 US dollars) in startup money and ten elderly workers, making plastic parts for television sets in a rented shed in Tucheng, a suburb of Taipei. A turning point came in 1980 when he received an order from Atari to make the console joystick. He further expanded his business in the 1980s by embarking on an 11-month trip across the US in search of customers. As an aggressive salesman, Gou arrived uninvited into many companies headquarters and was able to get additional orders, despite having security called on him multiple times. In 1988 he opened his first factory in mainland China, in Shenzhen, where his largest factory remains today. Operations in China significantly increased in scale when Gou vertically integrated the assembly process and facilities for workers. The manufacturing site became a campus that included housing, dining, medical care and burial for the workers, and even chicken farming to supply the cafeteria. In 1996, Hon Hai started building chassis for Compaq desktops. This was a breakthrough moment that led to building the bare bones chassis for other high-profile customers, including HP, IBM, and Apple. Within just a few years, Foxconn grew into a consumer electronics giant. In 2016, Gou's net worth was US$5.6 billion. By August 2017, Forbes listed his net worth at US$10.6 billion. Gou is also the main owner of HMD Global, which is a company founded in 2016 to sell