Hock Tan
President and CEO
Broadcom

Hock Tan has grown the company over the past two decades to become a leading provider of semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions globally.

Tan showed initiative and talent early in life. A Malaysia native, he was accepted to medical school there, but he opted instead to take advantage of a scholarship to study mechanical engineering at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

After graduation from MIT in 1975 with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, Tan had a stint as a research engineer with Union Carbide before returning to academia to earn his MBA from Harvard in 1979.

MBA in hand, Tan took on management roles at General Motors Corp. and PepsiCo. He then returned to his home country to become managing director at Hume Industries, before taking on the same role at Pacven Investment, which he co-founded in Singapore.

Tan entered the technology sector in 1992, when he was named vice president of finance at computer manufacturer Commodore International. His move into semiconductors came two years later when Integrated Circuit Systems hired him as a senior vice president and chief financial officer. It was in his role at ICS that he worked collaboratively with the U.S. Department of Defense on the radar systems for the Patriot anti-missile program.

In 1999, he was named CEO after heading up a management buyout. The sale of ICS to Integrated Device Technology in 2005 resulted in him becoming the executive chairman.

A year after Avago Technologies was created through a $2.66 billion buyout in 2005, Tan was brought in as president and CEO and embarked on a series of deals that made Avago (later renamed Broadcom) a more dynamic, innovative leader in the semiconductor industry.

Tan’s creativity and innovation are reflected in the business model that has helped grow Broadcom into the successful company it is today.

Broadcom’s growth under Tan has been both organic and the result of a series of bold acquisitions that advanced competition and innovation in the semiconductor and infrastructure software sectors. The Wall Street Journal once described Tan as “the chip industry’s most visible dealmaker.”

Through these acquisitions, Hock created and perfected an innovative business model to identify, build and grow what he calls “sustainable franchises.” These sustainable franchises form the foundation of Broadcom’s remarkable growth:

• Broadcom today is the 10th largest corporation by market capitalization in the S&P 500 at more than $700 billion;
• Broadcom technology powers the most complex IT systems in the world, connecting people, homes, production processes and businesses;
• More than 99 percent of all internet traffic crosses through some form of Broadcom technology.

Tan’s model is based upon three pillars: technology leadership, sustainable markets, and execution excellence.

Technology leadership: Tan has focused on businesses that are in a leadership position or capable of becoming No. 1 in their markets. Building upon its technology heritage from HP and AT&T, Broadcom continues to invest heavily in R&D and engineering talent to ensure that its leadership, through constant innovation, remains ahead of the competition.

Sustainable markets: When considering acquiring a new business, Tan looks for those with a durable, sustainable market over the long term. In other words, will the market still be there a decade from now? A growth market today is good, but a sustainable market over the long term is better.

Execution excellence: Broadcom is No. 1 in most of its businesses. Each of these sustainable franchises spanning semiconductor and enterprise software stay focused on what they do best. The highest priority is accorded to the roadmap that needs to be developed for these franchises to stay ahead and sustain. Engineering teams within each franchise are extremely adept in executing to very tight roadmap cadences, and in developing foundational technologies.

This innovative business model is only one example of how Tan has recast the product and business thinking in mature segments like semiconductors and enterprise software.

While acquisitions have helped fuel Broadcom’s growth, it’s notable that organic growth of the company’s franchises has also been a critical factor. For example, despite the company not making a semiconductor acquisition in more than eight years, its semiconductor business has grown from $17 billion in 2019 to $28 billion in 2023. All that growth has been organic and at a faster rate than the industry as a whole.

The key driver of growth has been the substantial investment in R&D, totaling tens of billions of dollars over the past five years. This investment has paid off in new and better products that are meeting customer needs.

AI is a good example. Broadcom’s success in AI infrastructure is no accident. Broadcom has been investing in AI R&D for nearly a decade. AI infrastructure needs connectivity, networking and custom chip technologies at which Broadcom’s long-term investment was directed. The result is the company is able to address a good portion of the AI hardware infrastructure market with the foundational technologies that were developed and evolved through this period.

More recently, Tan has been investing in infrastructure software companies, starting with Brocade in 2017, CA Technologies’ mainframe software business in 2018, and Symantec Corp.’s enterprise security division in 2019.

In 2023, Broadcom closed on its $86 billion deal to acquire cloud-computing company VMware, one of the biggest tie-ups in the history of the technology sector.

These moves have helped position Broadcom to take advantage of the growing interest in the potential of AI. The AI data center is a distributed computing and networking challenge, and Broadcom is working to provide the platform to address that challenge.

Broadcom’s market cap today stands close to $700 billion, a nearly 30x gain since the creation of Avago in 2005. The important factors in Broadcom’s remarkable growth story include Tan’s ability to identify businesses and markets that are stable over the long haul, to streamline and create focused divisions that developed into sustainable franchises, and his foresight to invest billions in R&D, which has fostered highly capable engineering teams synonymous with engineering excellence.

Tan’s philanthropy has been notable as well, with much of it focused on research into autism and other brain disorders. He has made substantial donations to research universities, including MIT, Cornell, Harvard and Stanford.