In 1998, as Russia’s Mir space station travelled hundreds of miles above the earth, Jonney Shih was monitoring its progress with particular interest down on the ground in Taiwan. The chairman of Asus was keen to know how the company’s laptops were faring in the stressful conditions on a 637-day trip into space.

1998年，当俄罗斯的和平号(Mir)空间站在地球上空数百英里处运行时，施崇棠(Jonney Shih)在台湾密切关注着进展。这位华硕(ASUS)董事长渴望得知，在637天的太空之旅中，该公司的笔记本电脑在压力环境下表现如何。

By 1997, Asus had been making motherboards for PC manufacturers for eight years, and Mr Shih decided the Taiwanese company needed to make its own computers in order “to make Asus a real brand”. To help establish its reputation, Asus “put reliability as the number-one criterion — we needed to beat all the other machines”, says the 63-year-old, wearing his usual dark suit and open-necked shirt, in a grey armchair at Asus’s Taipei headquarters.

截至1997年，华硕为个人电脑(PC)厂商制造主板已经8年，施崇棠做出决定，这家台湾公司需要制造自己的电脑，以“让华硕成为一个真正的品牌”。为了建立声望，华硕“把可靠性作为头号准则——我们需要打败其他所有的机器，”在华硕台北总部，现年63岁的施崇棠穿着惯常的黑西装和开领衬衫，坐在灰色的扶手椅上说道。

So it was a milestone when Asus’s early laptops survived the trip to Mir, unlike those of more established rivals.

因此，不像其他更老牌的竞争对手，华硕早期的笔记本电脑在和平号空间站的太空之旅中幸存下来，那是一个里程碑。

Asus flourished as a consumer-focused business, and alongside Taiwan rival Acer became one of the world’s top-five PC producers. By 2008, with HTC spearheading Google’s launch of the Android smartphone operating system, the island’s consumer electronics industry was a pillar of the economy, with a global heft disproportionate to Taiwan’s population of less than 25m.

作为一个以消费者为中心的企业，华硕繁荣发展，和其台湾竞争对手宏碁(Acer)一起跻身于世界五大个人电脑制造商之列。到2008年，随着宏达电(HTC)率先采用谷歌(Google)发布的Android智能手机操作系统，台湾消费电子产业成为岛内经济支柱，在全球举足轻重，远远超出台湾人口规模（不到2500万）所代表的比例。

Today, however, the outlook looks less bright. Global PC sales last year came in at about 289m units, according to research company Gartner — nearly a fifth below the high point of 2010, as smartphone-focused consumers spurn bulky computers. Since the start of 2011 Acer has racked up cumulative losses of NT$27bn ($836m), with the shrinking overall market compounded by loss of market share to the likes of China’s Lenovo. Acer’s shares have fallen 90 per cent during that period, as have those of HTC, which has been marginalised in the Android smartphone market by South Korea’s Samsung and Chinese rivals.

然而，今天的前景看起来黯淡了一些。根据研究机构高德纳(Gartner)的数据，去年全球PC销售量约为2.89亿台——比2010年的高位低了近五分之一，紧盯智能手机的消费者摒弃了笨重的电脑。自2011年初以来，宏碁遭遇270亿台币（合8.36亿美元）的累计亏损，在整体市场萎缩的同时，还被中国联想(Lenovo)这样的厂商夺走了一部分市场份额。在这段时间里，宏碁的股价下跌了90%，宏达电的股价表现也同样悲催，该公司在Android智能手机市场上不敌韩国三星(Samsung)和中国竞争对手。

Asus, however, has weathered the PC decline with small rises in market share and a shift towards more expensive devices, as well as a belated but modestly successful move into smartphones. At about $6bn, its market capitalisation is roughly where it was five years ago, and analysts expect it to report net profit for last year of about $530m. This is slightly higher than the 2010 figure, but nearly a quarter below its record earnings of 2012.

然而，华硕经受住了PC的衰退，市场份额小幅提升，并转向更昂贵的设备，其进军智能手机市场虽然较晚，但也小有成功。华硕现在的市值大约为60亿美元，和5年前基本相当。分析师们预计，华硕将报告2015年实现净利润约5.3亿美元，这略微高于其2010年的业绩数据，但比其2012年的创纪录利润低了近四分之一。

The contrast with Acer is bittersweet for Mr Shih, who spent his formative years there, culminating in leading its research and development work. When four of his engineers in 1989 started their own “small but beautiful company”, they asked Mr Shih to lead them.

华硕和宏碁的对比让施崇棠喜忧参半，他在宏碁度过了职业生涯中的关键成长期，最终领导宏碁的研发工作。当他手下的4名工程师在1989年自创“小而美的公司”时，他们强烈要求施崇棠来领导他们。

He asked Acer’s founder, Stanley Shih — no relation — for permission. “Acer was in difficulty … finally Stan convinced me to stay,” he says. But he provided financing to the fledgling company, and four years later he joined Asus as chief executive.

施崇棠征求了宏碁创始人施振荣（Stanley Shih，两人并无亲戚关系）的许可。“当时宏碁很困难……最后施振荣说服了我留下来，”施崇棠说。但他为羽翼未丰的华硕提供了资金，并在4年后以首席执行官的身份加入了华硕。

Mr Shih recalls instilling a culture of hard work after finding an engineering lab almost empty early one evening: “That’s a crisis, frankly speaking,” he says. He overhauled the hiring policy too, by picking promising graduates en masse from the elite National Taiwan University. Then came the decision to move into consumer electronics, which still makes up the overwhelming majority of Asus’s sales.

施崇棠回忆，有一天华灯初上的时候，他发现一间工程实验室几乎已空无一人，于是他在公司内着力打造一种勤奋工作的文化：“坦率地说，那是一场危机，”他表示。他还整改了招聘政策，从精英的国立台湾大学(NTU)成批挑选有才华的毕业生。接着他作出向消费电子业进军的决策，现在消费电子依然在华硕的销售中占绝大部分。

One factor behind Asus’s resilience in this field, say analysts, has been its pursuit of fresh sizes and configurations of its devices, helping it to secure a strong position in new and relatively high-demand product segments as PC sales languish.

分析师们表示，华硕在该领域的应变能力背后的一个因素是，该公司对产品不断尝试新规格和新配置，从而在个人电脑销售衰退之际在需求相对强劲的新产品领域取得强势地位。

In 2007 Asus unveiled the Eee PC — the first netbook, or miniature laptop. The innovation was widely copied by rivals, launching a new product category that enjoyed strong demand until Apple’s iPad kick-started the tablet market three years later.

2007年，华硕推出了首款上网本（迷你笔记本电脑）Eee PC。这一创新被竞争对手广为效仿，开创了一个需求强劲的新产品类别，直到3年后苹果(Apple)的iPad开创了平板市场。

Such innovation was the result of a shift in Asus’s culture away from a simple focus on technical performance, says Mr Shih. “To have a complete kind of innovation you need to start from the user desirability.” In 2011, Asus rolled out the Transformer, which can be adjusted for use as either tablet or laptop — another idea soon emulated by companies including Microsoft. In a colourful advertisement for Asus’s latest version, a talking cartoon bird chides a smartphone user: “You’re just making life difficult for yourself!” it says. “Glued to your tiny screens, giving yourself a migraine while you try to write a novel with your thumbs?”

施崇棠表示，这样的创新是华硕的文化发生转变，不再只专注于技术性能的结果。“要进行那种彻底的创新，你需要从使用者好感度出发。”2011年，华硕推出了Transformer Book变形笔记本电脑，该产品可以调整，变形为平板或者笔记本电脑——这个想法很快也被其他公司模仿，包括微软(Microsoft)。在最新款Transformer Book色彩缤纷的广告中，一只会说话的卡通小鸟嘲讽一名智能手机用户：“是在爽什么，”小鸟说，“荧幕小不拉几，失败。你那又肥又短的手指是要按到啥时。”

Mr Shih similarly defends the PC. “People say the PC is declining, but it only makes the desirability more clear. The PC is for professional, productivity computing,” he says.

施崇棠也为个人电脑做出了类似的辩护。“人们说个人电脑正在衰退，但这只是使其可取之处更加清晰。个人电脑的用处是专业、高效的运算，”施崇棠说。

However, both the PC and tablet sectors are clearly being cannibalised by larger-screen smartphones. So last year Asus made a jump into smartphones with the ZenFone, whose development team was subject to Mr Shih’s demanding standards. At one point he held a crisis meeting to figure out a way to fit the battery and speaker into the space. “Around midnight or 2 o’clock in the morning, one of the engineers work it out,” Mr Shih says. “If it’s a normal business meeting, I don’t think you can have a breakthrough... if it’s not painful, normally it’s not a hero product.”

然而，个人电脑和平板领域明显都正在被大屏智能手机侵蚀。因此，去年华硕推出ZenFone智能手机，挤入这个市场。施崇棠用严苛的标准要求ZenFone的开发团队。有一次，施崇棠举行了一个危机工作会议，以找出将电池和扬声器放入设计空间的办法。“大概是在午夜或者凌晨两点钟前后，其中一位工程师找到了方法，”施崇棠表示，“如果这只是一场平常的工作会议，我不认为你能够取得突破……如果不痛苦，通常它也不会是一款英雄产品。”

The cash resources and business networks created by its PC operation have helped Asus’s smartphone division to modest success in some developing countries: it had 12 per cent of Indonesia’s smartphone market and 7 per cent of Russia’s in the third quarter of 2015, according to Canalys. But Asus is a late entrant, arriving seven years after the iPhone. More , margins have been narrowed by competition from Chinese producers.

华硕PC业务产生的现金资源和商业网络帮助华硕的智能手机业务在一些发展中国家取得了一定的成功：根据Canalys的数据，2015年第3季度，华硕手机在印尼占智能手机市场的12%，在俄罗斯占7%。但华硕在智能手机市场上是个后来者，比iPhone晚了7年。此外，利润率也因为来自中国手机厂商的竞争而收窄。

“The final winner sometimes is not the first runner,” Mr Shih insists. Asus predicts its revenue from mobile dev will overtake that from PCs in 2018, and it expects to sell 30m smartphones in 2016, from about 21m last year. This has drawn scepticism from some analysts: Nomura, for example, predicts sales of 22m units in 2016.

“最后的赢家有时并非第一个起跑的人，”施崇棠坚称。华硕预测其移动设备业务的收入将在2018年超过PC业务，预计将在2016年卖出3000万部智能手机，而2015年这个数字约为2100万部。一些分析师对此表示怀疑：比如，野村(Nomura)预测华硕在2016年的智能手机销量将达到2200万部。

Smartphones are only one of the growth areas Mr Shih is targeting, however. Since handing over the chief executive role to Jerry Shen in 2008, he has remained the main public face of the company. But he also has more time to foster product areas aimed at compensating for the slowdown in Asus’s declining main business.

然而，智能手机只是施崇棠瞄准的增长领域之一。自2008年将首席执行官之位交给沈振来(Jerry Shen)以来，施崇棠依然是华硕主要的公开形象。但他也有了更多时间发展旨在补偿华硕主营业务下滑的产品领域。

In vocabulary peppered with business school jargon, one of Mr Shih’s favourite words is “megatrend”: in this case, the shift towards the “internet of things”, in which consumers rely on a constellation of networked devices.

施崇棠在讲话时经常蹦出商学院术语，他最喜欢的一个词是“megatrend”（大趋势）：目前，他指的是朝着“物联网”转变的趋势。在物联网中，消费者依赖一系列联网的设备。

Asus is expanding its range of such pr , from smartwatches to a smart television device made for Google, and Mr Shih is overseeing secret projects in robotics and augmented reality technology — a view of the real world embellished with computer-generated effects.

华硕正在扩大此类产品系列，从智能手表到基于谷歌Google TV平台的智能电视设备，施崇棠还在监督机器人和增强现实技术方面的秘密项目。后者是指将计算机产生的效果叠加到人的真实世界视觉。

“In the PC era, the box was the centre. Now we have to agree the cloud is the centre,” he says. “I do care a lot about the megatrend. Otherwise you may become irrelevant.”

“在PC时代，机体是中心。现在我们不得不认同，云端是中心，”他说，“我的确非常关心这一megatrend。否则你可能会变得无关紧要。”