On the occasion of Advantech’s 40th anniversary, Steve Rogerson talks with co-founder KC Liu about how the company has changed.

Back in 1983, you may not have noticed that three former Hewlett-Packard employees set up their own industrial computing company in Taiwan. That company was Advantech and today it is spread across the world employing more than 9000 people.

I thus took the opportunity at its 30th world partner conference last week in Taipei to sit down with one of those three founders – KC Liu, who is still chairman of the company – to find how his vision has changed over the past 40 years.

First, I must admit I developed a soft spot for Advantech in 2007 when they invited me to watch a car they were sponsoring at a Renault Clio Championship race at Donington Park in the UK. They knew the way to my heart. Since then, I have attended a number of their events and this was, I think, my fifth world partner conference.

It was at one of those conferences where I first heard the phrase “internet of things” and thought that would never catch on. Shows what I know. And at Advantech’s 2018 conference in Suzhou, China, the company was plugging the message of co-creation, where it designs and produces products in cooperation with partners, something that has become part of the firm’s DNA.

In fact, its campus in Taipei, where this year’s conference was held, is called the AIoT Co-Creation Campus, the third phase of which was only opened in August this year.

“Co-creation and enabling the intelligent planet are our two mission statements that we think about every day,” said KC. “Whether it is smart factories, energy management or smart cities, co-creation is about the integration.”

Despite having grown into a multinational corporation with subsidiaries in more than 20 countries, Advantech is still seen by KC as a niche player. It looks for opportunities and then invests and commits to those sectors with hardware platforms and the software orchestration on top of that.

“Platform, orchestration and sector, that is what we are moving towards,” he said. “We have these niche business units, and we don’t want to change that. The niche model is beautiful.”

The big change today, he said, was generative AI, which he described as like fighting with a machine gun rather than a knife.

“This will change and enlarge our business,” he said. “We want to invest heavily in AI. Our young people are excited about this.”

That said, finding more young people to join the business has become a problem. The average couple in Taiwan has 1.75 children, so the population is shrinking.

“We have to try to attract more young people and that is becoming harder,” he said. “We can’t base our growth on just attracting young Taiwanese people, so we have to import people.”

The company has set up a scheme to accommodate overseas hires while they find somewhere to live and has made an environment at its campus that people can enjoy with sports and leisure facilities; the main keynote sessions at this year’s conference were held on the basketball court.

“When we built the campus, we had in mind attracting new people,” he said. “I am proud of this campus.”

Specifically, it is looking to India for software engineers.

“We are looking at hiring another 200 people in India,” he said. “It is a good country for the software side.”

The company also has a university cooperation programme with internships before and after graduation.

“We have been doing this for several years and plan to expand the scheme globally,” he said.

KC said that though Advantech had grown massively, he didn’t think it has changed that much over the years. But at 69 years old, he admits one of his big tasks will be finding a successor. He knows the next two to three years will see the start of the process to find a replacement CEO.

“I am still working every day,” he said. “I will not retire. I have no plans to retire and go to Fiji. I find fishing boring. If I am still healthy, I will keep going.”

But has Advantech turned out like he expected all those years ago when he founded it with Chaney Ho and Huang Yu-ming?

“I remember when the company was two years old saying to my co-founders that we will never employ over one hundred people because we want to know every employee,” said KC. “The idea was happy employees and happy customers. But all the time we had new challenges and the company became bigger. It is totally beyond my expectations. I never thought it would be over 9000 people.”

Happy birthday, and here’s to the next 40 years.