Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) on Saturday said 635 companies have so far joined its open electric-vehicle (EV) development platform, which provides hardware and software to other automakers.
Participants in the MIH Open Platform are to start supplying products by the end of April, Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) said at an online weiya (尾牙) year-end event for the company’s employees.
The firm has been pushing its “three plus three” plan to expand from manufacturing into hardware and software integration, he said.
Photo: CNA
The initiatives refer to three emerging industries — electric vehicles, robotics and digital healthcare — that are being developed through artificial intelligence, semiconductors and communications technologies.
The development of electric vehicles is central to that initiative, and the aim is to build a supply chain for the industry, Liu said.
Hon Hai employees in more than 20 countries, including Taiwan, Brazil, the Czech Republic, China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Slovakia, the US and Vietnam, joined the weiya, the company said.
Separately on Thursday, Hon Hai, a key Apple Inc supplier, reported consolidated sales of NT$500.22 billion (US$17.62 billion) for last month, the company’s highest January sales, on the back of robust Apple iPhone 12 sales.
Last month’s figure rose 37.21 percent from a year earlier, the company said in a statement.
Hon Hai’s consumer electronics division posted the strongest growth, followed by the electronics component division, the computer division and the cloud-related device division, it said.
However, sales were down 29.92 percent from December last year, when consolidated sales of NT$713.78 billion exceeded NT$700 billion for the first time in any month since the company was founded.
Neither Hon Hai nor analysts identified specific products or subsidiaries to account for the nearly 30 percent drop.
However, it said in the statement that its cloud-related gadget division fared the best last month, followed by the computer division and electronic components division, with the consumer electronics division seeing the biggest monthly decline.
Meanwhile, FIH Mobile Ltd (富智康), a Hong Kong-listed subsidiary of Hon Hai, reported a net loss of US$175 million for last year, worsening from its net loss of US$12.18 million the previous year.
FIH Mobile manufactures products for non-Apple brands, such as Xiaomi Corp (小米), Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp (歐珀), Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Japan’s Sharp Corp, and has a broad production base in China.
As Hon Hai holds about a 62.8 percent stake in FIH Mobile, the unit’s losses are expected to hurt the parent company’s bottom line, analysts said.
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