As Apple’s lead iPhone assembler, contract manufacturing company Foxconn long made more than half of its revenue from the Cupertino company.
As of the last quarter, however, that proportion fell to below 29%, and the company says the shift is going to be permanent – leaving investors concerned …
Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant is so large that the city in which it is based is colloquially known within China as iPhone City. At one point, around 80% of the world’s iPhone production took place in this single facility.
While Apple has been working hard to diversify iPhone production beyond China’s borders, Foxconn has remained the company’s primary assembly partner. However, the proportion of the revenue made from this work has fallen below 29% within the most recent quarter.
The reason has nothing to do with the company making fewer iPhones, but rather the number of AI servers it now builds, as TNW reports.
Foxconn crossed a line this quarter that it will not cross back. Its cloud and networking division, the one that builds AI servers, made up 51% of revenue in the three months to June. That is the first time the segment has passed half. Smart consumer electronics, the division that contains the iPhone, came to 29%.
The company says that this shift is a permanent one.
Rotating chief executive Michael Chiang framed the shift as structural rather than cyclical. Cloud investment, he told analysts, “will become the most critical growth driver for Hon Hai over the next few years”.
Fellow Apple supplier TSMC is also experiencing rapid growth in the AI field.
[For] CoWoS, the advanced packaging technology from TSMC that AI chips depend on, the market expects that capacity to grow by more than 50% next year.
Investors, however, are somewhat concerned by this trend, given talk of an AI bubble. While Foxconn shares are up 17% this year, that’s well below the 57% increase seen across Taiwanese companies as a whole.
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