Kingston Technology

choi

Dinah Eng, The Power of Memory; John Tu didn't know much about storage when he started Kingston Technology. But he knew how to sell it. Fortune, Dec 23, 2013 (in the column How I Got Started).
money.cnn.com/2013/12/05/leadership/kingston-technology.pr.fortune/

Note:
(a) Dinah ENG
(i) Dinah
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinah
(Hebrew for "judged; vindicated;"  daughter of Jacob)
(ii) Eng is Cantonese for 伍 in Hong Kong.

Though zh.wikipedia.org for the pages of 伍姓 and 吳姓 (see next) do not include “Eng” as a variant for either surname, Google 吳 together with “Eng” (must be inside parenthesis) will return people surnamed 吳 which is transliterated into Eng. See also
Ng
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng
(The surname is sometimes romanized as Eng, among others)

Presumably, an vowel “E” is added to avoid confusion; otherwise foreigners do not know how to pronounce “Ng.”
(B) 闽南语：黃 Ng/Eng in Malaysia. See
黃姓
zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/黃姓

(b)
(i) Kingston Technology Corp 金士頓科技公司 (co-founded in 1987 by John TU 杜紀川 (now CEO and president) and David SUN 孫大衛 (now COO); based in Fountain Valley, California (in Orange County); private or closely held)
(ii) The article, in paragraph 1 , mentions “Kingston Technology, the world's largest independent manufacturer of memory products.”
  
I do not know what it means. Samsung (largest DRAM maker) and EMC (based in Hopkinton (a Boston suburb), Massachusetts) are also called the largest in storage hardware. Likely, the emphasis is on “independent”--meaning private, not trading stock.
(iii) "When we needed a name, we started with Kensington because it sounded regal. But another company already had that name. I had loved the Kingston Trio, so we became Kingston Technology."

The Kingston Trio
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingston_Trio
(three members; Years active 1957–1967; deciding on the name "Kingston Trio" because it evoked, through its association with Kingston, Jamaica, the calypso music popular at the time)


(c) Mr Tu was born in Chongqing in 1941.

In this article, he says, "I was born in Chongqing, China, and our family moved to Shanghai in 1945, where my father worked for the Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek government. After two years the civil war in China was getting close to Shanghai, so we moved to Taiwan. We speak Mandarin, and had to get used to the Taiwan dialect. I felt totally lost at school. I had an uncle in Germany who owned a Chinese restaurant, so after graduating from high school in 1960, I went there. I knew how to speak a few sentences in English, but no German. After several weeks I went out on the street to find someone who spoke English. A biker led me to an old priest who had lived in China, and he sent me to a language school in Munich. I wanted to study electrical engineering, but in Germany you have to apprentice for two years [first], so I worked at a shipbuilding factory. The foreman looked at me as cheap labor, and I had to tough it out. Those two years were crucial in my life. German society is very homogeneous. There were few foreigners, and they were called Ausländers * * * After getting my degree in electrical engineering, I went to work for Motorola in Wiesbaden, Germany. In 1970 my sister agreed to petition for me to become a US citizen. She [had] moved to Arizona"  (The "first" within parenthesis is in original)
(i) So John Tu was in Taiwan 1947-1960, age 6-19; in Germany 1960-1970 ("1969" in (iv) below), age 19-29.
(ii) He received his electrical engineering degree from Technische Universität Darmstadt
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technische_Hochschule_Darmstadt
(English: Technical University of Darmstadt or Darmstadt University of Technology; in the city of Darmstadt, Hesse of Germany; public; established in 1877)
(iii) 徐仁全, 金士頓創辦人杜紀川、孫大衛 秀才配大俠 拓荒美國大西部. 遠見雜誌, December, 2006.
www.gvm.com.tw/Boardcontent_12655.html
(" 2004年總統大選傳出兩聲槍響後，台灣出身的金士頓科技公司（Kingston）創辦人孫大衛，在酒後說出願意捐出1億台幣做為重新驗票費用，讓他一度成為全台最轟動的人物。1996年時，位在美國加州洛杉磯的金士頓科技，創辦人孫大衛及杜紀川為了犒賞員工，主動拿出1億美元供做員工分紅，平均每位員工分到800萬台幣 [that year the exchange rate was ~ T$24 = $1] ")

There is no need to read the rest of the report.
(iv) Marc Star, Midas of Memory; Sent to Germany to escape a bad school record, a young immigrant named John Tu opened a Scottsdale gift shop, then moved on to building two-billion-dollar PC-add-on leader Kingston Technology.
goldsea.com/RTR/Tujohn/tujohn.html

, under the heading:
Asian American Rags-to-Riches Sagas. Goldsea.com, Feb 7, 2005.
http://goldsea.com/RTR/

(v) ausländer (noun masculine; feminine: ausländerin; ausländ "noun neuter: foreign countries, collectively--uncountable" + -er): “foreigner”

(d) “In 1986 we sold the company [called Camintonn, which John Tu and David Sun had co-founded in 1982] for $6 million to AST Research. It was the American dream come true. That $6 million became $4 million because of Uncle Sam * * * In 1996, Kingston was valued at $1.8 billion. * * * Masayoshi [SON 孫 正義, founder of SoftBank] made an offer to buy 80% of Kingston. We felt responsible for the lives of our employees. If we took SoftBank's offer, we'd have close to $1 billion to share with them. So we sold Kingston and gave $100 million in bonuses to the 450 people or so who worked for us. * * * SoftBank asked [during negotiation of the sale] if it could give us cash and stock and $300 million in an IOU that it would pay over two years. The contract said that if it defaulted, we could take the company back. Instead, we forgave the $300 million IOU because we felt Kingston wasn't worth $1.8 billion at the time. SoftBank was shocked."
(i) "because of Uncle Sam": tax (federal as well as state)
(ii) The same in the 1996 sale to SoftBank. Minus $300 million, the sale price was $1.5 billion. Tax authorities took a third. Of the remaining $1 billion, $100 million wqas distributed among company workers. This is what (c)(iii) was about.