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.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
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
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
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS