Cher Wang

Cher Wang was born in Taipei in 1958, the daughter of Wang Yung-ching, one of Taiwan's wealthiest industrialists and founder of the Formosa Plastics conglomerate. She studied economics and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, then returned to Taiwan rather than joining her father's business directly, working first at a computer trading firm and co-founding a memory-chip company.

In 1997, with her own money and a small team, she co-founded High Tech Computer, later known as HTC, in a modest office in Taoyuan, initially building handheld computers and devices for other brands to sell under their own names. In 2000 the company built one of the first touchscreen PDA phones for a European carrier, and through the 2000s it manufactured devices for Palm, Microsoft and, eventually, Google, before launching phones under its own HTC name.

The company was an early mover in a market that later became dominated by a handful of giants; HTC's own-brand handset business shrank sharply after 2011 as Samsung and Apple pulled ahead, and much of its phone division was eventually sold to Google in 2017. Wang has continued running the company through the downturn, steering it toward virtual reality hardware with the Vive headset.

She was named to Fortune's list of the most powerful women in business multiple times during HTC's rise and has spoken about the pressure of operating in an industry that moves faster than most companies can adapt.