Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) completed his purchase of a stake in Sharp Display Products Corp, paving the way for the two groups to cooperate on the production of panels used in televisions and cellphones.
SIO International Holdings Ltd, wholly owned by Gou, paid ￥49 billion (US$617 million) to buy 979,200 shares of Sharp Display from Sharp Corp, Osaka-based Sharp said in a statement yesterday.
The transaction follows a ￥17 billion payment Gou made last month as the first stage in his acquisition of a 37.6 percent stake in the display business.
Gou, founder of Foxconn and chairman of its flagship Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), which manufactures Apple Inc’s iPad, is investing his own money in the display business to share the risk after Hon Hai agreed to buy a stake directly in Sharp. The display unit will be renamed Sakai Display Products Corp and operate an advanced 10th-generation liquid crystal display factory in Osaka prefecture.
Hon Hai said on June 23 it would book a loss of NT$4.27 billion (US$142 million), while Foxconn Technology Co (鴻準), a smaller affiliate that makes metal computer casings, would mark down about NT$2.1 billion, from their purchase of new stock in Sharp.
The write-downs followed a drop in the stock of the Japanese electronics maker from the ￥550 a share price they agreed on for the deal.
Hon Hai and Foxconn Technology Co will have a combined 9.9 percent stake in Sharp after the companies complete the transaction this month.
Sharp will own 37.6 percent of Sakai Display, while Toppan Printing Co and Dai Nippon Printing Co will own 9.54 percent each after merging their operations with the display maker, according to a May 24 statement. About 5.7 percent of shares will be held as treasury stock.
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
RSS