Terry Gou, founder of Foxconn, which manufactures components for Apple’s iPhone, said Saturday at an event that mainstream monetary finance could not really be decentralized and only an underground economy would adopt cryptocurrency, as reported by Taiwanese local media Economic Daily News.
Fast facts
- Gou later said in a Facebook post — to clarify comments made in an earlier interview — that the crypto market is still mixed with the good and the bad with great speculation.
- “Cryptocurrency and NFT fulfill the transaction needs in the virtual world, but moving forward they need to be incorporated into the real world and the real economy to really merge with people’s lives,” Gou wrote in the post, adding that this idea is still “insufficient as a topic for discussion.”
- Gou added that it will take another five to 10 years for the metaverse concept to mature, with a long way to go for relevant applications. He said there are many research and development opportunities in the process, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement in terms of application, so it’s “unrealistic” to talk about the boom of application at the moment.
- As one of Taiwan’s richest men with a net worth of US$6.4 billion according to Forbes, Gou is a prominent business and political figure, who in 2019 took part in a presidential bid in a move he claimed was inspired by sea goddess Mazu. He later announced his withdrawal from Taiwan’s main opposition Kuomintang Party, where he came in second in the 2019 presidential primary, and said he quit the presidential race.
- However, Foxconn’s investment arm HCM Capital appears to be quite active in the crypto and blockchain space. HCM’s portfolio includes investment platform Digital Currency Group, Bitcoin-native financial services company Unchained Capital and crypto investment management firm Galaxy Digital, according to its website.