FIH Mobile Ltd (富智康), a handset manufacturing arm of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), yesterday said it is making mobile phones for new customer InFocus, helping the US projector brand tap the smartphone market.
It is the latest move by FIH Mobile, which was formerly named FIH International Holdings Ltd (富士康控股), to expand its customer base outside of Apple Inc to Chinese smartphone start-ups.
FIH also makes phones for Xiami Corp (小米) and Huawei Technology Co (華為).
DESIGN, MANUFACTURING
Instead of just manufacturing phones, at slim margin, FIH Mobile now “designs, develops and manufactures the phones for InFocus,” Charles Lin (林佳億), a senior director of FIH Mobile, told reporters.
FIH Mobile is also exploring new business opportunities in the Greater China region, targeting new Chinese mobile phone brands, Lin said.
SUBSIDIARY HELP
Since more than 50 percent of its components, such as camera modules, come from Hon Hai Group (鴻海集團) subsidiaries, FIH Mobile is able to make high-quality phones at affordable prices, Lin said.
Hon Hai Precision is the flagship company of Hon Hai Group.
To save on costs and time to market, FIH Mobile is now using handset chips from Qualcomm Inc and MediaTek Inc (聯發科), Lin said.
InFocus, which is shifting its business focus from the projector business to consumer products, debuted its first smartphones in Taipei yesterday before a launch in China next month.
InFocus’ goal is to become one of the top five mobile phone brands in Taiwan within two years and to make it onto China’s top 10 list within three years, InFocus chairman John Hui (許立信) told a media briefing.
The Portland-based company plans to roll out three or four new smartphones by the end of this year.
TACKLING TABLETS
InFocus also plans to enter the tablet market. The company is scheduled to launch its first tablet in October in its home market, Hui said.
The tablet will be made by Hon Hai Precision, which also makes LCD TVs for InFocus.
The newly launched IN610 and IN810 smartphones are priced at NT$11,900 and NT$13,900 per unit.
The phones, powered by Google’s Android system, are equipped with 5-inch and 6.1-inch screens from Sharp Corp, since the trend is to use screens bigger than 5-inches for phones, rather than 4.3-inch displays.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
RSS