K.C. Liu

Liu co-founded Advantech in 1983 in Taipei and has spent four decades building it into the undisputed global leader in industrial computing and IoT platforms. Advantech's products — embedded boards, industrial PCs, edge intelligence servers, and IoT software platforms — form the invisible backbone of factory automation, intelligent transportation, smart healthcare, and digital retail across 92 countries. The company commands a dominant market share in the global industrial PC market. Liu's vision has consistently been ahead of industry trends. He pivoted Advantech from a hardware-only industrial PC manufacturer to an IoT platform company with the WISE-PaaS platform, enabling customers to build edge-to-cloud IoT applications. His "co-creation" business model — partnering with domain-specific integrators rather than trying to build vertical solutions in-house — has proven remarkably scalable and capital-efficient, allowing Advantech to address hundreds of vertical markets without the overhead of deep domain expertise in each. His decisions on R&D investment in edge AI computing, geographic expansion priorities (particularly the balance between China, Southeast Asia, and Western markets), M&A strategy for acquiring niche IoT capabilities, and pricing discipline in an increasingly competitive embedded computing market are the key factors shaping Advantech's growth and profitability trajectory.