Hou Chih-yuan

A 2013 Business Today profile gives Hou Chih-yuan’s year of birth as 1984. In 2008 he earned a master’s degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University.⁠[1][2]

In 2008, during the global financial crisis, his father, Hou Bo-yi, took control of Universal Cement, and a week after finishing his Harvard master’s degree Hou Chih-yuan was called back to Taiwan and joined the company at 24 directly as a vice president. He later acknowledged that this was not necessarily the best way to handle succession, but said the business then needed a trustworthy owner on site.⁠[2]

At Universal Cement he took charge of sales while his elder brother, Hou Chih-shengHou Chih-shengHou Chih-sheng (Johnson Hou) is a Taiwanese engineer and businessman with a PhD in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is vice chairman and chief executive of Universal Cement Corporation and president of its subsidiary Uneo, a fourth-generation member of the Tainan Gang’s Hou family and the elder son of Hou Bo-yi. His LinkedIn profile lists him as chief executive officer of the pressure-sensing company Tekscan since November 2025.Open the full entry, handled management and the electronics business; father and sons restructured the staff, disposed of the mainland plants and expanded the gypsum board business.⁠[1]

His LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry profile lists him as a director of Universal Cement since December 2008; as a vice president since June 2009, managing the cement, concrete and plasterboard divisions and acting as company spokesperson; and as chief marketing officer of Uneo since September 2013.⁠[3]

A May 2024 Business Today article described him as Universal Cement’s chief operating officer; he used a line from the film The Grandmaster to describe his great-grandfather Hou Yu-liHou Yu-liHou Yu-li was a Taiwanese entrepreneur and a founding figure of the Tainan Gang. Born in Beimen, Tainan, he started as a cloth-shop apprentice, founded the Hsin Fu Hsing cloth business and went on to help found Tainan Spinning and Universal Cement, backing figures such as Wu Hsiu-chi and Kao Ching-yuan; Tainan Gang companies include Uni-President and Prince Housing. He was paired with Wang Yung-ching as “Wang in the north, Hou in the south.”Open the full entry’s sense of timing.⁠[4]

Company registration records list Hou Chih-yuan as a director and president of Universal Cement. In a June 2026 Business Today podcast he discussed the company’s exit from mainland China, vertical integration of its ready-mixed concrete and gypsum board businesses in Taiwan and the introduction of AI and automation, and described Universal Cement as a stock for long-term holders, with earnings per share of about NT$2 in recent years.⁠[5][2]

In June 2023 the Liberty Times summarized a family chart of Jensen HuangJensen HuangJensen Huang is a co-founder of NVIDIA who served as its president, chief executive officer, and a director from the company’s founding in 1993 until he resigned from those positions in November 2026. He has a background in electrical engineering education and the semiconductor industry, and under his leadership NVIDIA’s business expanded from graphics chips to GPU general-purpose computing, artificial intelligence, and data center computing platforms.Open the full entry compiled by veteran journalist Wu Chia-chin: Huang’s mother, Lo Tsai-hsiu, and Lisa SuLisa SuLisa Su is a semiconductor engineer and business executive who serves as Chair and CEO of AMD. She earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale. After joining AMD in 2012, she became CEO in 2014, led the company’s growth in high-performance computing, data centers, and artificial intelligence, and also became Chair in 2022.Open the full entry’s maternal grandfather, Lo Po-mu, are siblings; Su Chin-chien, the daughter of Huang’s third maternal aunt, Lo Sui-liu, married Hou Bo-yi, the eldest grandson of Hou Yu-li and chairman of Universal Cement, which makes the Hou family’s fourth generation, Hou Chih-sheng and Hou Chih-yuan, Huang’s first cousins once removed.⁠[6]

His LinkedIn profile lists him as a director of the Columbia Alumni Association of Taiwan since 2011 and of the Harvard Club of ROC since 2014.⁠[3]

Universal Cement Corporation: Official website: http://www.ucctw.com/ (opens in a new window) (as listed in its company registration).⁠[5]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-chih-yuan-hou-429b3b9/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]