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.

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.

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