Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), which assembles Apple Inc’s iPads and iPhones as well as electronic gadgets for other brands, yesterday said its revenue contracted about 11 percent sequentially to NT$1.3 trillion (US$41.7 billion) last quarter, attributing it to faltering demand for smart consumer electronics, smartphones primarily.
The demand for two categories — computer products and cloud and networking products — was higher than expected, which was boosted by new PC product launches by customers, the company said.
Revenue from the two categories registered a quarterly growth last quarter, exceeding Hon Hai’s previous expectation of a flat performance, the company said.
Photo: Fang Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
Hon Hai expected PC customers’ inventory digestion efforts to approach an end in the second quarter, while server customers from enterprises might take until the third quarter, Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) told investors in May.
Revenue from electronic components such as camera lenses showed robust growth quarter-on-quarter as the company expected, Hon Hai said.
Market share gains also helped drive the growth, the company said.
On an annual basis, revenue sank 13.75 percent last quarter compared with NT$1.51 trillion in last year’s second quarter. During the first six months of this year, revenue dropped 5.25 percent year-over-year to NT$2.77 trillion compared with NT$2.92 trillion during the corresponding period last year.
Businesses would gradually ramp up this quarter as the electronics industry’s peak season is under way, Hon Hai said.
Revenue this quarter is expected to pick up at a slightly faster pace, compared with the quarterly growth rate of 16 percent registered in the third quarter last year and 4 percent in the third quarter in 2021, Hon Hai said.
The revenue growth rate is expected to be approximately on par with the pre-pandemic period, Hon Hai said.
For the full year this year, revenue would be little changed from last year’s NT$6.63 trillion, Liu said in May.
The conservative estimate came as growing macroeconomic uncertainty blurred order visibility, Liu said at the time.
This year as a whole, PC products and optoelectronic components would be the major growing areas, he said.
However, it would be a big challenge to retain its gross margin at a similar level with last year at 6.04 percent, given volatility in foreign exchange rates and extra operating spending due to pandemic measures, Liu said.
The company maintained its 10 percent gross margin target for 2025, Liu said.
Hon Hai is to release detailed financial figures and provide updates about its business outlook in an investors’ conference on Aug. 14.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS