Wang family
Wang Yung-ching, born to a poor tea-farming family with only an elementary education, founded Formosa Plastics Corporation in 1954 with his brother, using a roughly $800,000 US aid loan to build what was then the world's smallest PVC production plant.
How the fortune was built
The business grew into Formosa Plastics Group, a vertically integrated petrochemical and plastics conglomerate linked by cross-shareholdings and centered on major naphtha-cracker complexes in Taiwan, with US manufacturing added from 1989. Following Wang Yung-ching's death in 2008, succession disputes among his children became a well-documented case study; his brother's sons emerged as the largest second-generation stakeholders, and the group now operates as a decentralized set of independently listed, cross-held subsidiaries.
Where the family invests today
The family's principal enduring institutional vehicle is the Chang Gung Medical Foundation, founded in 1973 in memory of Wang's father, which built one of Asia's largest private hospital systems paired with Chang Gung University — functioning as the family's major ongoing investment in healthcare and education infrastructure. On the corporate side, the group continues large-scale petrochemical expansion, including a long-contested ethane-cracker project in Louisiana; no distinct outside family-office or venture-investing arm was identified beyond this core business and institutional endowment.
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