The founder and chairman of Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, the world’s largest contract maker of electronic goods, urged the establishment of a “smart society” that incorporates devices with services

June 16, 2014 Leave a comment

Hon Hai’s Gou calls for creation of ‘smart society’

CNA

2014-06-11

The founder and chairman of Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, the world’s largest contract maker of electronic goods, urged Tuesday the establishment of a “smart society” that incorporates devices with services.

Addressing the Global Device Summit as part of the Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai, Terry Gou said people need a smart and connected society because devices alone cannot meet people’s demands.

“Devices are terminals. Cloud computing, cloud storage and transmission through the internet have to be integrated,” the executive said in his keynote presentation.

While noting that wearable devices will play an important role in areas such as health management, Gou also acknowledged that some current wearable devices have been unable to generate long-term customer engagement.

“The problem doesn’t lie in the device per se, but the integration of the cloud network and the terminal. We need to have a bigger ecosystem,” he said.

Gou said this need for integration also extends into other markets, for example the automotive sector, in which a number of auto manufacturers and operators have initiatives intended to drive the adoption of smart vehicles.

Such propositions will not work without a supporting “smart city” initiative that can work across products and services from different parties, the chairman added.

According to industry body GSMA’s Mobile Economy Asia Pacific 2014 report, the Asia-Pacific region accounted for half of the world’s 3.4 billion mobile subscribers in 2013 and will remain one of the world’s fastest-growing mobile markets through 2020 and beyond.

Most of the Asia-Pacific mobile subscribers are concentrated in four major markets — China, India, Japan and Indonesia, in order of size. Together, these account for 75% of the region’s subscribers, and more than 30% of the global total, according to the GSMA report.

 

Filed under Macro Trends, TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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