Foxconn aims to capture 10% of the global electric vehicle market from 2025 to 2027. Although Apple had previously contacted a number of carmakers, the latest news shows that Apple's orders in the automotive field may be entrusted to Hon Hai group, a long-term partner in assembling iPhone, the parent company of "Foxconn".
Disclosure from leaksappro shows that Apple The development of automobile is in progress, and the official release will still be at the end of 2025 or 2024.
For this news, on May 4, Foxconn told the first financial reporter that it would not comment on market rumors. But judging from the previous actions, Foxconn is increasing its investment in the field of automobile OEM to attract Apple's attention.
At the briefing of Hon Hai's investment legal person in the fourth quarter of 2021 held in March this year, Hon Hai Chairman Liu Yangwei said that as one of the main axes of development, Hon Hai will continue to expand its customer base, seek the participation of existing car factories and start-ups, and assist customers in mass production and scale expansion.
"Hon Hai's EV (electric vehicle) cooperation has been in progress. Accelerating business transformation and mass production, and developing higher value components and software are the focus of Hon Hai's EV development in 2022." According to Liu Yangwei, by 2025, Hon Hai aims to have a market share of 5%. The target of vehicle production will be 500000 to 750000 vehicles, of which the revenue contribution of vehicle OEM is expected to exceed half.
Previously, Liu Yangwei had set a "must achieve goal" for Foxconn, and the electric vehicle related business received $35 billion (about 223 billion yuan) by 2026.
Anxin international securities once pointed out in the research report that the global electric vehicle market will reach 36 million a year from 2025 to 2030, and Foxconn aims to win a 10% share from 2025 to 2027.
As Apple's largest OEM, Foxconn has accelerated the layout of its automobile business in recent years. On the one hand, it mainly undertakes mobile phone After the business enters the stock competition stage, it is driven by new business. On the other hand, it accumulates OEM capacity in new energy vehicles, and then OEM for more third-party enterprises.
Combing Foxconn's investment in the automotive field, we can see that since 2015, Foxconn has frequently contacted car manufacturing enterprises, successively took shares in Baiteng, held hands with Fisker, and established a joint venture with stellantis.
In January last year, Foxconn established a joint venture with Geely Holding, covering the OEM production and customized consulting services of automobile enterprises, including but not limited to the whole automobile, parts, intelligent control system, automobile ecosystem and the whole industry chain process of electric vehicles. According to the joint venture agreement, each party holds 50% of the shares. In October of the same year, Foxconn founder Gou Taiming, who had long retired, also provided a platform for Foxconn's electric vehicle product model e, and also released two products, electric bus model T and SUV model C.
But for Foxconn, the challenge in the field of automobile OEM is not small. An urgent problem is that the boost of capital makes it more and more difficult to get tickets to the new energy vehicle track, and the threshold for doing the OEM business behind it is obviously higher.
The reason is that the biggest purpose of technology companies is to make more cars install their own car operating system, and their own hardware equipment become the industry standard, and there are only two ways to realize it, making cars by themselves or cooperating with car manufacturers. But for Foxconn, the competitors on this runway are not only BYD, an old rival, but also Huawei, a neighbor who claims to "build good cars for car companies instead of making cars themselves"( ?k=WP0ZSPklWdlZyN4MTPklWYmYDO5IDNy0DZp9VZ0l2cmYiRyUSbvNmLsxWYtZnL3d3dGJTJGJTJBNTJzBHd0h ) , who to form an alliance with and how to build an ecological environment are unavoidable topics.
In addition, even if Foxconn entered the automotive field through investment or cooperative development in the early stage, from the market feedback in recent years, Foxconn has not achieved "first mover advantage" in this field.
The news of Apple's project has been "spread for eight years", and the "gossip" objects of negotiation include six auto manufacturers, such as BMW, Daimler, Toyota, Volkswagen and Hyundai. In the view of the industry, Apple has always hoped to copy its R & D and production mode in the mobile phone field to the automobile, fully control the technology and hand over the production to the OEM, but the search for the "OEM" is not so smooth. It is also reported that the apple auto team has been dissolved.
In 2021, the departure of five executives of "Titan team" showed that Apple's car building was not smooth. "Titan project" was the internal code name of Apple's car building plan in 2014, which was created by the first generation iPod Team leader Steve zadsky is the person in charge.
Guo Mingyu, an analyst at Tianfeng international securities, previously posted on twitter that Apple's auto project team has been disbanded for some time. "If you want to mass produce apple car in 2025, you need to reorganize the team within 3 to 6 months."