Stan Shih

Founder of Acer

• Born: December 18, 1944
• Place of Birth: Lukang Township, Changhua County, Taiwan

Primary Company/Organization: Acer

Introduction

Widely considered the father of Taiwan's electronics industry, Stan Shih founded Acer with his wife, Carolyn Yeh, in 1976 and turned it from a small electronics parts distributor to one of the largest manufacturers of personal computers (PCs) in the world. In Shih's wake, other Taiwanese companies, such as HTC and Asustek, have made waves in the computer industry, holding their own against their American and Japanese competitors.

Early Life

Shi Zhenwrong, known in the Western world as Stan Shih, was born on December 18, 1944, in Lukang Township, Changhua County, Taiwan. He was an only child raised by a single mother, his father having died in 1948. As a boy, he helped his mother sell stationery and duck eggs in two separate businesses. While the duck eggs were sold at a lower profit margin, turnover was every two to three days instead of every two to three months, and the egg business actually provided most of the Shihs' income. He studied electronics engineering at the National Chiao Tung University, earning both bachelor's and master's degrees. After school he took jobs as an electrical engineer for a few years, working on calculators and other consumer gadgets, first at Unitron Industrial Corporation and later at Qualitron Industrial Corporation (which he cofounded).

Life's Work

In 1976, Shih founded Multitech, a distributor of electronics parts, with five coworkers and his wife, Carolyn Yeh. Shih's ambitions were considerable from the start. Although the company sold mainly parts in its first years, his long-term vision was to create a global brand. Multitech did moderately well as a parts distributor and entered the personal computer market as that sector began to explode in popularity. The company released three Micro-Professor (MPF) personal computers, each of them something of an oddball. The first, MPF-I, was a tutorial computer designed for learning computer programming and was built into a case shaped like a book that also held manuals and cassettes and could be stored on a bookshelf. The MPF-II was an Apple clone with a small built-in keyboard and an unusually proportioned case. The MPF-III was ostensibly an Apple IIe clone but was made to look like a PC. Unusual as they were, the Micro-Professors sold well; indeed, the MPF-I remained in production into the twenty-first century, although it was sold to another company.

When he founded Multitech, Shih was confident that microcomputers, not mainframes, would be the wave of the future, and his patience paid off. The Micro-Professor line was almost like an experiment—each computer radically different from the others in its design, rather than just increasing the capabilities of previous models, as the company toyed with different approaches to find the one that best suited it and its customer base. This led to the unusual choice of Multitech, manufacturer of some of the world's first Apple clones, to abandon its successful Apple clones to become a PC-compatible manufacturer—almost as though the PC appearance of the MPF-III foreshadowed the company's future.

Under Shih's leadership, Multitech focused on optimizing its supply chain and developing strong relationships with suppliers, which its first five years as a parts distributor facilitated. As a result, Multitech was able to introduce the world's second Intel 386–based PC in 1986, only a month after Compaq introduced the first. Many of the practices Shih pioneered at Multitech were eventually adopted as industry standards in computer manufacturing, and the spread of Multitech's cost-effective manufacturing practices was a tremendous factor in bringing computer costs down in the 1980s—and for a time accounted for the vast price differential between a PC-compatible machine and an Apple product, which helped solidify the "two-party system" of computing, rather than eventuating in one of them disappearing (as happened with the videotape format Betamax when VHS became dominant).

In 1987 Shih's company changed its name to Acer. Much of the PC manufacturing Acer did was contract manufacturing on behalf of larger companies such as Dell and IBM. Despite his cost-saving measures, Shih was not interested in finding the least expensive way to make a computer, and he did not see cheap Chinese manufacturers as Acer's competitors. While other Taiwanese companies made components for the major Western and Japanese computer manufacturers, Shih intended to compete with them. However, the company's first sustained effort to enter the American market ended in 1999, after millions of dollars were spent trying to raise awareness of the brand, to little effect.

The company restructured several times—including spinning off its manufacturing to a separate company, Wistron—and eventually reentered the American marketplace from a position of strength, acquiring Gateway (and the eMachines brand it had itself acquired) as well as others. In the meantime, just as Shih had built relationships with suppliers, so too did he build relationships with distributors in order to create a distribution chain that did not require Acer to try to beat Dell at the direct-sales game. Success in Europe was followed by success in North America, where Acer America Corporation was formed to handle Acer business for the United States and Canada.

Shih served as chair of Acer from its inception until 2004, when he retired to run a consulting firm, iD SoftCapital Group. Among other things, iD raised millions of dollars to help other Taiwanese companies raise their global profile. Shih was also a vocal critic of later arrivals on the computing scene, such as Apple's iPad and MacBook Air, and suggested that Microsoft's plan to develop a tablet was a bad decision. Shih returned to Acer as CEO in 2013 to help the company through a period of struggles. He once again retired from daily operations in 2014, but retained the title of honorary chair.

In addition to his work in the computer industry, Shih pursued other ventures and interests. Over the course of the 1990s, he and his wife oversaw the creation of Aspire Park in Taiwan, which shared the name of Acer's first Intel machine. A community on the outskirts of Taiwan's capital city of Taipei, Aspire Park included manufacturing facilities, apartments, single-family homes, recreational facilities, and Aspire Academy, a school teaching leadership skills to Asian executives.

Shih also served as a chair of the Asia Business Council and a governor of the Asian Institute of Management, a member of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's board of directors, and a member of the International Advisory Panel for Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor. He was recognized by numerous awards and magazine lists, including Fortune magazine's 25 People You Ought to Know for Doing Business in Asia in 1989, Businessweek's 2004 25 Stars of Asia, and Taiwan's Ten Most Outstanding Young Persons in 1976.

In 2023, Shih led a collaborative effort of Acer, Wistron, Formosa Plastics, Novatec Yachts, and Monte Fino Yachts. The companies were developing zero-carbon emission yachts in Taiwan using artificial intelligence to monitor and make decisions about employing the multiple systems integrated into the vessels, such as solar and intelligent kites with robotics.

Personal Life

Shih married Carolyn Yeh, cofounder of Acer, on September 28, 1971. They had three children. Shih's mother also lived with the family. In his retirement he was active in charitable work as well as serving as Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian's special representative at APEC Australia 2007, the conference of meetings among the twenty-one countries of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

Bibliography

Dedrick, Jason, Kenneth L. Kraemer, and Tony Tsai. "Acer: An IT Company Learning to Use IT to Compete." Oct. 1999. eScholarship, University of California. Web. 20 Aug. 2012.

Garten, Jeffrey E. The Mind of the CEO. New York: Basic, 2001. Print.

Lee, Aaron, and Jack Wu. "Acer Founder Stan Shih Seeks to Build Future Ship Together with Taiwan's Industries." DigiTimes Asia, 21 Sept. 2023, www.digitimes.com/news/a20230919PD202/acer-future-ship-sustainability-yacht.html. Accessed 8 Mar. 2024.

Mathews, John A. Dragon Multinational: A New Model of Global Growth. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

Shih, Stan. Me Too Is Not My Style. San Jose: Acer, 2010. Print.

"Stan Shih." Acer Group, 2018, www.acer-group.com/ag/en/TW/content/stan-shih. Accessed 29 Oct. 2019.