Hou Yu-li

Hou Yu-li came from Erchonggang in Beimen, Tainan. His father died when he was four, the family was poor, and at 11 he was already doing odd jobs in a factory. He worked as an apprentice in a cloth shop and also sold joss paper in his home village.⁠[1]

At 27 he went into the cloth trade in partnership with relatives, and the next year set up Hsin Fu Hsing on his own; it soon became one of the leading cloth wholesalers. In the 1930s he took over the struggling Matsu Tower weaving mill and turned it into the Hsin Fu Hsing textile mill, moving the family from trade into manufacturing. During the war he went to Osaka to buy controlled goods and traded between Japan and Taiwan.⁠[1]

Wu Tsun-hsien and his brother Wu Hsiu-chi, who later became key figures in the Tainan Gang, both started out at Hsin Fu Hsing.⁠[1]

In 1955 Hou Yu-li and the Wu brothers founded Tainan Spinning. In 1959, when the Tainan Gang planned to set up a galvanized steel pipe plant, he insisted on cement instead; Universal Cement was founded in 1960 with capital of NT$100 million, of which his family put up NT$50.5 million. His grandson Hou Bo-yiHou Bo-yiHou Bo-yi is a Taiwanese businessman, chairman of Universal Cement Corporation and the eldest grandson of Tainan Gang founder Hou Yu-li. He took control of the company’s management in 2008, serving as both chairman and president, and brought his sons Hou Chih-sheng and Hou Chih-yuan into the business. His wife, Su Chin-chien, is a cousin of Jensen Huang.Open the full entry recalls that Hou Yu-li put the most into founding the company and personally inspected the plant construction.⁠[1]

Business Today in 2013 described Universal Cement as the company Hou Yu-li founded in 1960.⁠[2]

Business Today writes that Hou Yu-li and fellow Tainan natives Wu Hsiu-chi, Wu Tsun-hsien and Kao Ching-yuan formed the Tainan Gang through ties of blood, marriage and hometown, which besides Universal Cement and Tainan Spinning also gave rise to Uni-President and Prince Housing; in its day the group gave rise to the phrase “Wang (Yung-ching) in the north, Hou (Yu-li) in the south.”⁠[1][3]

His eldest grandson, Hou Bo-yi, later became chairman of Universal Cement, and his great-grandsons 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 and Hou Chih-yuanHou Chih-yuanHou Chih-yuan (Jack Chih-Yuan Hou) is a Taiwanese businessman and the president of Universal Cement Corporation, a fourth-generation member of the Tainan Gang’s Hou family and the younger son of Hou Bo-yi. A week after finishing a master’s degree in East Asian studies at Harvard University in 2008, he joined Universal Cement at 24 as a vice president in charge of sales, later becoming chief operating officer and then president.Open the full entry became its vice chairman and its president. The character for “li” in his name was also used for the name of Universal Cement’s subsidiary Uneo.⁠[4][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, linking the Hou family to Huang and Su as distant relatives and making the Hou family’s fourth generation, Hou Chih-sheng and Hou Chih-yuan, Huang’s first cousins once removed.⁠[5]

Universal Cement Corporation: Official website: http://www.ucctw.com/ (opens in a new window) (as listed in its company registration).⁠[4]