Founded in 1987 by John Tu and David Sun, Kingston is one of the world's largest manufacturers of computer memory. David Sun has marked very important milestones in the development of memory chips. His partner, John Tu, made Kingston a global brand with his entrepreneurial spirit.
John Tu (1941- )
John Tu was born on August 12, 1941 in Chongqing, China. In 1949, the Tu family left China and settled in Taiwan due to the political developments in China. John Tu, who spent his youth in Taiwan, was not satisfied with the education system implemented there. Getting low grades in most of his lectures, John spent most of his time listening to music. He did not even want to live in Taiwan, he dreamed of going to his uncle, who runs a Chinese restaurant in Germany.
In 1960, John Tu went to live with his uncle in Germany and started working as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. But his uncle wanted John to get a good education and encouraged him in this regard. His nephew, however, did not know a word of German and spoke very little English. After learning German for a short time from a Chinese priest, young John enrolled in a language school in Munich and learned German very well within 2 years. In his spare time in Munich, he worked in a shipbuilding factory.
At the encouragement of his uncle, young John enrolled in the electrical engineering department at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt in Hessen, Germany, in 1966. He found an educational program at the school that matched his expectations and showed good academic success. After graduating in 1970, he started working at Motorola in Wiesbaden. In 1971, he immigrated to the USA in hopes of a better life.
John Tu and David Sun
In the 1970s, the USA wanted to keep its dominance in almost every field under the conditions of the Cold War, and provided great support to R&D studies in every field, especially in technology. The US state of California has managed to stand out in this field with the California Institute of Technology (California Institute of Technology), known as Caltech, and Silicon Valley. John Tu, who studied electrical engineering at the university, saw that technology would come to the fore more in the future, and he knew that it was necessary to be in California to do great work in the field of technology in the USA. Therefore, he settled in Southern California and started making new friends.
In these years, Silicon Valley became the meeting point of young talents with HP, founded by William Redington Hewlett and David Packard. These young people, most of whom are Caltech graduates, came together in the garages of their houses and developed various projects in the field of technology. In such a circle of friends, John Tu met David Sun, with whom they would later form Kingston. Computer memories, one of the most important problems of the period, were one of the subjects that both of them focused on. If desired improvements were made in computer memory, both the size of computers could be reduced and their processing capabilities could be increased. To achieve this, Tu and Sun began working together on computer memories.
Caminton Corporation
In the late 1970s, John Tu and David Sun were manufacturing data storage products and memory modules for computer companies in a small garage. By establishing Camintonn Corporation in 1982, they formalized their commercial activities and strengthened their corporate relations in the computer memory market. While John Tu assumed the management of the company, David Sun shouldered the entire burden of the operation. In order to meet the increasing demand with institutionalization, they turned to the field of human resources and increased the qualified workforce capacity of the company thanks to personnel training. The innovative solutions they developed together enabled Tu and Sun to achieve a high sales success in the computer memory market. So much so that in 1985 the annual turnover of the company reached 9 million dollars.
John Tu and David Sun founded Camintonn Corporation with a very low capital and went to borrow money to provide the necessary financial support. As the company grew, the shortage of resources for the necessary investments increased, and the company's resource shortage could not be overcome due to the debts and interests paid. To solve this problem, John Tu proposed to obtain the necessary resource from the stock market. In the first half of the 1980s, the process went their way, and the profits they made by trading shares strengthened the financial structure of the company. However, as the company grew, the resources invested in the stock market began to increase and the risks taken increased. And unfortunately, on October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones Index dropped more than 22 percent, causing the company to lose its entire existence. With this event, which went down in history as Black Monday, John Tu and David Sun lost all their assets.
Kingston Technology
With all their savings wiped out during Black Monday, the Tu and Sun duo had to pick things up again to survive. They decided to sell Camintonn Corporation to raise the necessary capital. The $6 million in capital from the sale enabled them to found Kingston Technology in 1987. In other words, Black Monday was a very important turning point for Tu and Sun duo. Thus, instead of making large investments in the field of memory modules, they focused on production and R&D studies with a team with high operational skills in memory chips.
One of the main reasons Kingston achieved better performance than Camintonn Corporation was that it pioneered many innovations in memory chips. The new methods and techniques used in R&D studies were very important milestones in the development of memory chips. These methods and techniques, developed by David Sun, who is the COO of the company, have made Kingston products more successful than their counterparts on the market. As the CEO of the company, John Tu managed to use his entrepreneurial spirit on a global scale and in line with the demands of the industry and made Kingston a world brand.
In the 1990s, Kingston began to grow into one of the world's largest independent memory manufacturers, with memory products developed for desktop and laptop computers as well as servers, printers, mobile phones, MP3 players and digital cameras. According to John Tu, production centers had to be spread across different geographies for the company to increase its global strength. After California, Kingston's production facilities were established in Malaysia, Taiwan and China, respectively. The company also established sales offices in England, Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, India, Latin America and Turkey, and expanded the sales network of its products globally.
Today, Kingston products are sold in 110 countries around the world. The company, which successfully manages the production of memory modules for various technological products, especially computers, worldwide, has a turnover of over 4 billion dollars per year. The number of employees it employs is close to 2,000. John Tu, who is ranked 123rd in the Forbes 400 list of the world's richest business people, explains the formula for success as "a little luck, a lot of work".