John Tu (Chinese: 杜紀川; pinyin: Dù Jìchuān; Wade–Giles: Tu Chi-ch’uan; born August 12, 1941) is a Chinese-American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is the co-founder of Kingston Technology.
Tu controls a 50% stake in Kingston Technology and co-founder David Sun controls the balance, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times that was later confirmed by a company spokesperson.
Kingston is the world’s biggest independent maker of computer memory products, according to the company’s website. The closely held company had revenue of $16.1 billion in 2022, according to its 2022 sustainability report.
Kingston is valued using the average enterprise value-to-sales multiple of four publicly traded peers: Transcend Information Inc, Western Digital Corp, Adata Technology and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. The valuation was updated for 2022 results on July 7, 2023, leading to a rise of about $1.5 billion.
Tu and co-founder Sun sold 80% of Kingston to Softbank for $1.5 billion in 1996. The proceeds used in this analysis are reduced by $400 million to account for a $100 million bonus the pair distributed to Kingston employees after the sale and $300 million they deducted from the price after agreeing to renegotiate the sale terms. The details, reported by Bloomberg News at the time, were confirmed by Tu in a 2013 interview with Fortune magazine. The billionaires bought back the stake from Softbank for $450 million two years later.
David Leong, a spokesman for the company, declined to comment on the billionaire’s net worth.
Biography
John Tu was born in Chongqing, China. He was the son of an official in China’s Nationalist government. He moved to Shanghai with his parents in 1945, before going to Taiwan two years later as the Chinese civil war neared the coast. John felt totally lost at school. He describes himself as a mediocre student unable to attend the best Chinese colleges. Therefore, John moved in 1960 to Germany. He wanted to study electrical engineering, but John didn’t know how to speak German. He knew how to speak a few sentences in English. So after several weeks, he went out on the street to find someone who spoke English. A biker led him to a priest who had lived in China, and sent him to a language school in Munich. In Germany at that time, a two-year apprenticeship was required for everyone, so he worked at a shipbuilding factory. After working there for two years, he studied electrical engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt in Germany and graduated in 1970. He then went to work for Motorola in Wiesbaden, Germany. In 1971 he moved to California.
Tu moved to Arizona in 1970, opening a gift shop in Scottsdale before entering the real estate business as a developer. He became a U.S. citizen in 1972, and moved to Los Angeles where he met David Sun, an engineer who worked at electronic component maker Alpha Micro. The pair founded memory device maker Camintonn in 1982, and sold the business for $6 million to AST Research in 1986. The duo lost all of their savings in the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987 before founding computer memory module maker Kingston Technology, where Tu remains chief executive officer.
Tu and Sun sold an 80 percent stake in the closely held company to Softbank for $1.4 billion in 1996, and distributed $100 million of the proceeds to their employees. They bought back Softbank’s stake three years later for $450 million amid shrinking demand.
Tu is married with two children. He plays the drums in his band JT & Friends.
Career
In 1982, he co-founded Camintonn with David Sun. in 1986, they sold it for $6 million and founded Kingston Technology. In 1996, they sold 80 percent of the company to Softbank for $1.5 billion, before buying it back in 1999 for $450 million
Philanthropy
In 2021 Tu made a donation to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation that enabled the Pulitzer Prize-winning Storm Lake (Iowa) Times to buy its local competition and a weekly in an adjoining county. He has supported Erin Gruwell‘s Freedom Writers and the Freedom Writers Foundation. In 2011, he donated $1.2 million to give every first year medical student at UC Irvine an iPad
Milestones
- 1941 John Tu is born in Chongqing, China.
- 1972 Becomes a U.S. citizen and moves to Los Angeles.
- 1986 Sells Camintonn for $6 million to AST Research.
- 1987 Loses all his savings in the Black Monday stock market crash.
- 1987 Founds Kingston Technology with David Sun.
- 1996 Softbank buys 80 percent of Kingston for $1.5 billion.
- 1999 Buys back Softbank’s stake for $450 million with partner Sun.
- 2011 Kingston reports record revenue of $6.5 billion.
