Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s largest contract electronics maker, is expected to forge deeper and more comprehensive collaborations with its main customer Apple Inc, the company’s chairman said on Tuesday.
Speaking before a dinner banquet on Tuesday to mark the company’s 50th anniversary, Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) said that the two companies would forge a deeper and more extensive partnership.
“Everything that should be there will be there and nothing will be missed,” Liu said, when asked about the progress made in Hon Hai’s collaborations with Apple in the artificial intelligence and electric vehicle (EV) fields.
Photo: Chang I-hwa, Bloomberg
Hon Hai is the largest assembler for Apple. In addition to iPhone, it makes other Apple products, such as iPads, MacBooks, AirPods and Apple Watches. It gets more than half of its business from Apple.
Liu said that aside from Apple, several of Hon Hai’s international partners also dispatched representatives to the banquet, including its other main customers HP, Dell, Cisco, processor and chip makers Intel, NVIDIA, AMD and Arm, and automotive chipmaker NXP.
Asked about Hon Hai’s plans to expand its footprint overseas, Liu said that it is continuing its collaboration with India’s HCL Group in semiconductor outsourced assembly and testing (OSAT) development in the South Asian nation, and is in negotiations with the local government on issues regarding subsidizing semiconductor manufacturing.
Construction of an EV factory in Thailand has almost been completed and Hon Hai will determine when to begin taking orders depending on future market development, Liu said.
Asked about Hon Hai’s plan to set up a joint-venture company to build and operate a new 12-inch wafer fab in Malaysia, Liu said that a worldwide chip shortage has prompted chipmakers in many countries to accelerate building new factories to increase manufacturing capacity.
However, as upstream supply relies heavily on downstream demand, Liu said Hon Hai would decide whether to go ahead with a Malaysian wafer fab by observing downstream demand.
“Does the world need so many fabs?” Liu said.
Liu added that Hon Hai was not sure yet and would continue to pay attention to the issue.
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