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.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said that its investment plan in Arizona is going according to schedule, following a local media report claiming that the company is planning to break ground on its third wafer fab in the US in June. In a statement, TSMC said it does not comment on market speculation, but that its investments in Arizona are proceeding well. TSMC is investing more than US$65 billion in Arizona to build three advanced wafer fabs. The first one has started production using the 4-nanometer (nm) process, while the second one would start mass production using the
A TAIWAN DEAL: TSMC is in early talks to fully operate Intel’s US semiconductor factories in a deal first raised by Trump officials, but Intel’s interest is uncertain Broadcom Inc has had informal talks with its advisers about making a bid for Intel Corp’s chip-design and marketing business, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Nothing has been submitted to Intel and Broadcom could decide not to pursue a deal, according to the Journal. Bloomberg News earlier reported that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is in early talks for a controlling stake in Intel’s factories at the request of officials at US President Donald Trump’s administration, as the president looks to boost US manufacturing and maintain the country’s leadership in critical technologies. Trump officials raised the
‘SILVER LINING’: Although the news caused TSMC to fall on the local market, an analyst said that as tariffs are not set to go into effect until April, there is still time for negotiations US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that he would likely impose tariffs on semiconductor, automobile and pharmaceutical imports of about 25 percent, with an announcement coming as soon as April 2 in a move that would represent a dramatic widening of the US leader’s trade war. “I probably will tell you that on April 2, but it’ll be in the neighborhood of 25 percent,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club when asked about his plan for auto tariffs. Asked about similar levies on pharmaceutical drugs and semiconductors, the president said that “it’ll be 25 percent and higher, and it’ll
CHIP BOOM: Revenue for the semiconductor industry is set to reach US$1 trillion by 2032, opening up opportunities for the chip pacakging and testing company, it said ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控), the world’s largest provider of outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) services, yesterday launched a new advanced manufacturing facility in Penang, Malaysia, aiming to meet growing demand for emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The US$300 million facility is a critical step in expanding ASE’s global footprint, offering an alternative for customers from the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea and China to assemble and test chips outside of Taiwan amid efforts to diversify supply chains. The plant, the company’s fifth in Malaysia, is part of a strategic expansion plan that would more than triple
RSS