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全球權勢媽媽美國【富比士】雜誌票選王雪紅入列

Cher Wang: The Most Powerful Woman In Wireless

This story appears in the November 7 issue of Forbes Asia.

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.

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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.

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美國《富比士》雜誌配合昨母親節，應景選出全球最有權勢的二十個媽媽。其中台灣宏達電董事長王雪紅排第十六名，與第二十名的緬甸民主鬥士翁山蘇姬是「唯二」進榜的亞洲媽媽，后座由美國國務卿希拉蕊奪得。

希拉蕊奪后冠

《富比士》是根據其評選的年度全球權勢女性排行榜，依其掌控資金、決策權和影響力等多重指標，整理出「全球最有權勢媽媽」排行榜。《富比士》提及，最有權勢媽媽榜首希拉蕊雖工作繁忙，但兩年前仍透過電子郵件，掌握女兒雀兒喜的婚禮準備進度。

王雪紅是已故經營之神王永慶之女，與丈夫陳文琦育有兩名二十歲上下的兒子。王雪紅先前受訪時曾說：「小孩子是我們最好的產業。」她希望孩子將來當牧師，而不是繼承自己的事業。她還說，對兒子有期待，但不會干預他們的發展方向。《蘋果》去年曾跟拍篤信基督教的她，發現除了每周日和老公、大兒子上教堂，還曾一家搭計程車外出，吃一頓兩百五十元的咖哩飯。

宏達電主管昨對此表示，由於董事長個性低調，對這個評選不便代為表示意見；王雪紅去年入選《富比士》全球百大最有權勢女性，名列第二十。

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