Kwok Yuen Ho: Wizard of 3-D
When kids around the world opened up their Christmas packages, many were thrilled to find eye-popping 3-D computer games. In addition to their parents, they should also thank KWOK YUEN HO and his little known but rapidly growing company, ATI Technologies Inc. Ho, a 48-year-old Chinese emigre, has built suburban-Toronto ATI into the hottest 3-D chipmaker in the computer industry. With Dell, Compaq, and IBM among his biggest customers, sales and earnings are soaring. Even better, Ho enjoys a 33% share of that supercharged market--more than four times rival Intel's share.
ATI's recipe for success has been to move ever more swiftly in an industry where product-cycle turnaround counts for everything. By double-teaming engineers to keep a steady stream of innovations moving through the pipeline, Ho has been able to cut his turnaround time in half, to under nine months. His latest chip, Rage 128, which gives dizzying reality to such hot new games as Quake II and Half-Life, is less than a month old. But Ho is already pushing to release a next generation version, just as 3-D imagery begins to surge on the Net. If it catches on with E-commerce suppliers, that market too should be lucrative.
Masterminding the growth has been a heady leap for the soft-spoken, youngish-looking Ho, who grew up nearly destitute in mainland China. After working for nine years in Hong Kong for such outfits as Control Data and Philips, he moved to Canada to help found ATI in a Toronto garage in 1985. The company went public in 1993.
Now, with 1,600 employees reporting to him, Ho is determined to keep creativity flowing up the command chain. He makes a point of regularly talking with as many staffers as he can and he even eschews reserved parking spaces for senior staffers. Just as he hustles to find a parking space every morning, Ho has grabbed his own special place in the booming graphics chip market.
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