Hon Hai Precision Industry Co’s (鴻海精密) MIH platform for electric vehicles (EVs) is to become an independent business unit in July, the company said at the first MIH Open Platform Alliance membership meeting in Taipei yesterday.
More than 1,200 companies in the EV supply chain have joined the alliance since its inception in October last year.
Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) said that the firm’s goal is to consolidate Taiwan’s EV component makers so that they can cooperate with each other.
Photo: Chen Rou-chen, Taipei Times
“Due to Taiwan’s limited domestic market, it is hard to develop a business-to-consumer model,” Liu said. “However, a platform to bring together all of the nation’s talent on a business-to-business basis is perfect for the development of EVs.”
The development of “software-defined vehicles” was central to the member-only meeting in the Songshan Tobacco Factory in Taipei, which was livestreamed online.
“In the future, you will be able to develop 80 percent of an EV’s functions on the cloud,” Hon Hai chief technology officer William Wei (魏國章) said.
“Our goal is to provide vehicle developers with a complete stack development environment that mimics today’s development environment for consumer electronics,” Wei said. “It will be like what we had for desktop computers for the past 20 years and for smartphones in the past 10 years.”
Wei said that the EV development cycle can be shortened, from five years to two-and-a-half years, and development costs and risks reduced through cloud-based systems.
EV design can be streamlined by “pushing the whole system layer to the application layer,” Wei said.
“We push the domain of battery management into the application layer so that everybody can join in disrupting the space,” he said.
Among the MIH members is Tony Lin (林東閔), chief executive officer of Aeon Motor Co (宏佳騰), a maker of electric scooters.
Lin said that through flexibility in EV development, a whole new mobility market would emerge.
The MIH platform can accommodate vehicles as diverse as busses and microvehicles, he said.
“When you call a Uber you are hiring a five-person sedan with a driver to carry one passenger,” Lin said, referring to the California-based ride-hailing service.
“What if in the future you can just hire a 1-seater autonomous car?” Lin said. “Taiwan needs this alliance to bring us together so we can be seen by the world.”
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
WEAKER ACTIVITY: The sharpest deterioration was seen in the electronics and optical components sector, with the production index falling 13.2 points to 44.5 Taiwan’s manufacturing sector last month contracted for a second consecutive month, with the purchasing managers’ index (PMI) slipping to 48, reflecting ongoing caution over trade uncertainties, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The decline reflects growing caution among companies amid uncertainty surrounding US tariffs, semiconductor duties and automotive import levies, and it is also likely linked to fading front-loading activity, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “Some clients have started shifting orders to Southeast Asian countries where tariff regimes are already clear,” Lien told a news conference. Firms across the supply chain are also lowering stock levels to mitigate
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
RESHAPING COMMERCE: Major industrialized economies accepted 15 percent duties on their products, while charges on items from Mexico, Canada and China are even bigger US President Donald Trump has unveiled a slew of new tariffs that boosted the average US rate on goods from across the world, forging ahead with his turbulent effort to reshape international commerce. The baseline rates for many trading partners remain unchanged at 10 percent from the duties Trump imposed in April, easing the worst fears of investors after the president had previously said they could double. Yet his move to raise tariffs on some Canadian goods to 35 percent threatens to inject fresh tensions into an already strained relationship, while nations such as Switzerland and New Zealand also saw increased
RSS