Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), yesterday said that it has withdrawn from a US$19.5 billion semiconductor joint venture with Indian metals-to-oil conglomerate Vedanta Ltd, in a setback to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s chipmaking plans for India.
Hon Hai, the world’s largest contract electronics maker, and Vedanta signed a pact last year to set up semiconductor and display production plants in Modi’s home state of Gujarat.
“Foxconn has determined it will not move forward on the joint venture with Vedanta,” the electronics maker said in a statement, without elaborating on the reasons.
Photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins, Reuters
It said it had worked with Vedanta for more than a year to bring “a great semiconductor idea to reality.”
However, they had mutually decided to end the joint venture and it will remove its name from what now is a fully-owned Vedanta entity, Foxconn said.
Vedanta and India's IT ministry did not reply to requests for comment.
Foxconn is best known for assembling iPhones and other Apple Inc products, but in recent years it has been expanding into chips to diversify its business.
Reuters has previously reported that Modi's plan was in trouble, with the Vedanta-Foxconn project proceeding slowly as their talks to involve European chipmaker STMicroelectronics NV as a partner were deadlocked.
Vedanta-Foxconn had got STMicro on board for licensing technology, but India's government had made clear it wanted the European company to have more "skin in the game," such as a stake in the partnership.
STMicro was not keen on that and the talks remained in limbo, a source had previously said.
India, which expects its semiconductor market to be worth US$63 billion by 2026, last year received three applications to set up plants under a US$10 billion incentive scheme.
These were from the Vedanta-Foxconn joint venture, Singapore-based IGSS Ventures Pte Ltd and global consortium ISMC, which counts Tower Semiconductor Ltd as a tech partner.
The US$3 billion ISMC project has also stalled due to Tower being acquired by Intel Corp, while another US$3 billion plan by IGSS was halted as the firm wanted to resubmit its application.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS