Barry Lam is a Taiwanese billionaire businessman, and the founder and chairman of Quanta Computer, He is also a patron of the arts and a philanthropist in the area of culture and education. In 2020, Forbes estimated his net worth at $4.5 billion. Barry Lam was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong. His father was an accountant for the Hong Kong Club. He studied engineering in Taiwan, graduating from National Taiwan University with bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering. In 1973, he and some former classmates founded, a manufacturer of handheld calculators. As president of the company he built it into the largest contract manufacturer of calculators. In the late 1980s, he became convinced that notebook computers would be the next big product. He left Kinpo and founded Quanta Computer in 1988. He set up Quanta Computer with the help of a colleague, C. C. Leung, with capital of less than US$900,000. It had a turnover of NT$777 billion in 2007, US$23.7 billion. In 2006, Fortune Magazine included Quanta in the Fortune Global 500 Companies, and in 2007, Forbes placed Quanta 15th in its ranking of the world's most admired computer companies, the highest of a Taiwanese company. Quanta designs and manufactures for clients such as Apple Inc., Compaq, Dell, Gateway, BlackBerry Ltd., Hewlett-Packard, Alienware, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Gericom, Lenovo, LG, Maxdata, MPC, Sharp Corporation, Siemens, Sony, Sun Microsystems, and Toshiba. It is the largest manufacturer of PC notebooks worldwide and has diversified into servers, storage, and liquid-crystal display terminals.
Quanta
Lam established the Quanta Research and Development Center at its headquarters in Taiwan. The center works on many collaborative projects with major institutions such as MIT, National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica on producing next generation products.
MIT Project T-Party
In 2005, Lam and Quanta joined forces with MIT on Project T-Party, a five-year initiative to create the next generation of platforms for computing and communication. The project aims to create new interfaces and explore new ways of managing and accessing information.
Lam decided that Quanta would be the original design manufacturer for the OLPC XO-1 by the One Laptop per Child project. Quanta took orders for one million laptops as of 2007-02-15. The OLPC project was also part of Quanta's Blue Ocean Strategy, entering new market segments which are uncontested in terms of competition.
Arts patronage and philanthropy
Lam is one of the foremost patron of the arts in Taiwan. He has a personal collection of more than 1,000 works of art and in particular, he collects Chinese paintings and calligraphy. One of his favourite painters is Zhang Daqian, and he has more than 250 of his works. He is a sponsor of the Zhang Daqian Museum, which is housed in the artist's former home. He has incorporated a Museum of Art and Technology in the headquarters of Quanta in Taiwan, and he displays his personal art collection there. He is chairman of the Advisory Committee of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, one of the leading museums worldwide. It has the largest collection of Chinese artefacts in the world. He is chairman of the Contemporary Art Foundation which manages the MoCA Taipei. He is director of the Cloud Gate Dance Theater group, a Taiwanese modern dance group, which has performed in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and toured Europe extensively. He is founder and chairman of the Quanta Cultural and Educational foundation, which promotes culture, art and education in Taiwan. It promotes educational exhibitions and programs for schools free of charge. It has held more than 20 exhibitions in 291 schools, with more than 1.3 million young people participating in its educational activities. The foundation has received the Wen Hsin Golden Award from the Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan, for its outstanding promotion of social education many times. In November 2002, Barry Lam announced that he would fund a new College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at his alma mater National Taiwan University. It opened in July 2004, and is known as the Barry Lam Hall. It houses the Barry Lam Art Gallery in its basement. He is chairman of the Dwen An Social Welfare Foundation, a charitable organisation funded by leading business people in Taiwan. He is a board director of the China Exploration and Research Society, a Hong Kong-based group dedicated to understanding the natural wonders of China.
