Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday said that its shareholders had approved a proposal to distribute a cash dividend of NT$4 per common share, the highest in 20 years.
The iPhone maker also said it was upbeat about its prospects for the second half of the year.
“The global parts supply shortage is of limited impact for us now,” Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) said at the company’s annual general meeting in New Taipei City’s Tucheng District (土城). “I am optimistic about the rest of the year.”
Photo: screen grab from the Internet
The company expects minimal impact from the floods in China’s Zhengzhou City, where it has key production facilities, Liu added.
The Zhengzhou facilities in Henan Province supply the bulk of the company’s iPhone manufacturing capacity, but they have been spared from the floods, Hon Hai said.
“All our iPhone facilities remain fully functional,” although due to the severity of the floods, it has affected staff getting to and from work, the company said.
“Reports of a flooded Hon Hai facility is a small desktop component [operation] outside the main industrial park,” he added.
Liu also issued a statement touting Hon Hai’s efforts to grow its electric vehicle (EV) business, emphasizing the importance of forming a complete and collaborative supply chain with other companies through the MIH — Mobility in Harmony — alliance.
The alliance, which became an independent non-profit entity this month, now boasts 1,800 supply chain members and hopes to become “the Android of EVs” — an open standard to facilitate cooperation between suppliers.
Liu said that regional production is a “growing trend” and that it is inevitable that Hon Hai would create self-sufficient supply chains globally.
“We will take our experience of integrating vertically in China and working with various suppliers and replicate it all over the world,” Liu said.
Although Hon Hai is best known as the world’s largest contract electronics maker and a leading assembler of Apple products, Liu said he is looking forward to the EV business making a contribution.
“We will first see some results from key EV component sales, with whole vehicle sales starting from the fourth quarter of 2023,” Liu said.
“By 2025, we hope that 10 percent of EVs will contain some Hon Hai components,” he said.
Hon Hai’s EV line will start with electric buses, sedans and scooters, and the company will “continue to seek opportunities for collaboration around the world,” he said.
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
RESPONSE: The Japanese Ministry of Finance might have to intervene in the currency markets should the yen keep weakening toward the 160 level against the US dollar Japan’s chief currency official yesterday sent a warning on recent foreign exchange moves, after the yen weakened against the US dollar following Friday last week’s Bank of Japan (BOJ) decision. “We’re seeing one-directional, sudden moves especially after last week’s monetary policy meeting, so I’m deeply concerned,” Japanese Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Atsushi Mimura told reporters. “We’d like to take appropriate responses against excessive moves.” The central bank on Friday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years, but Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda chose to keep his options open rather than bolster the yen,
Global server shipments are expected to surge to 15 million units next year, from 4 million units this year, with artificial intelligence (AI) servers accounting for about 30 percent, driven by massive capital spending by major cloud service providers, the Market Intelligence and Consulting Institute (MIC) said on Thursday last week. Major cloud service providers — including Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc, Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Meta Platforms Inc — are projected to budget US$450 million for capital expenditure next year, up from US$400 million this year, MIC ICT [information and communications technology] Industry Research Center director Edward Lin
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS