Pegatron

Chapter 1 When Scale Wasn't Enough During the PC notebook and smartphone eras, Taiwanese manufacturers became masters of scale.

Companies like Foxconn, Quanta, Compo, Wisdron, and Pegatron built enormous global manufacturing networks.

They became exceptionally good at procurement, yield management, logistics, quality control, and mass production.

But the customer usually controlled the economics.

In the same year came an even grander gamble, a mega semiconductor fabrication facility in Dholera in Gujarat, in partnership with Taiwan's Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, with a price tag of roughly ninety-one thousand crore rupees or about over ten billion dollars.

Now, complementing these mega projects, Tata Electronics and subsidiaries have executed a string of aggressive alliances, partnerships, and joint ventures, acquiring, for instance, the Indian manufacturing arms of Wistron and Pegatron to anchor their iPhone assemblies and other consumer electronic supply chains and manufacturing.

And that brings us to the point, so to speak.

These high-tech bets sit at the very center of what is shaping up to be a bitter battle for control at the top of one of India's oldest conglomerates.

I mean, so our Series D. was some huge percentage of it came from Taiwan.

And Taiwanese OEMs, ODMs, I flew out to Taipei, met with a lot of the folks that we do a lot of business with these days, whether it's WeWinWistron, Pegatron, companies like Chenbro, which you wouldn't have even thought These are just much more non-traditional investors, but they're all business people who understand the industry and who better to raise from.

Charles Leon, who's a good friend of mine now, who's the founder of Supermicro.

We've always kind of gone in and really tried to find...