Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms.
The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said.
The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance.
Photo: Reuters
Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to put greater focus on building data center server racks and other equipment for AI clusters. That has helped its stock reach a record high this year.
With Apple’s business making up more than half of its revenue, its investors are watching the Taiwanese company for clues on iPhone sales. Hon Hai posted about a 10 percent plunge in first-quarter revenue, in part because Apple’s flagship device underperformed.
The second quarter remains a traditional off-peak season and a transition period for major products, Hon Hai said.
Visibility for the second quarter is approximately in line with market expectations, with operations outlook for the period expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth, Hon Hai said.
“Hon Hai may face hurdles boosting its iPhone-related revenue in 2024 given first-quarter’s downbeat demand and the swirl of unknowns clouding the broader picture. Despite being the iPhone’s largest producer, Hon Hai’s margins may be at increased risk from diminished scale economies within the iPhone business, and the steady capacity relocation to India,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Steven Tseng (曾緒良) said.
In the first four months of the year, Hon Hai’s cumulative sales totaled NT$1.83 trillion, down 3.11 percent from NT$1.89 trillion a year earlier, company data showed.
Separately, Largan Precision Co (大立光) yesterday reported sales of NT$3.46 billion for last month, up 0.18 percent from March and 20.1 percent higher than a year earlier, which was in line with the company’s expectations.
The smartphone camera lens supplier’s cumulative sales in the first four months were NT$14.77 billion, up 23.01 percent from a year earlier, Largan said in a statement.
The company said sales last month grew for the ninth consecutive month on an annual basis and is expected shipment momentum to stay strong this month.
High-end products of 20 megapixels or greater accounted for 20 to 30 percent of the company’s sales last month, and between lenses of 10 and 20 megapixels accounted for 50 to 60 percent of sales, while 8 megapixel products accounted for less than 10 percent, and products in the “other” category made up 10 to 20 percent, it said.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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