Liu Yangwei takes office! Has Foxconn started a new era of semiconductor transformation?

Hon Hai completed the re-election of new directors at the shareholders' meeting on June 21, and the new Hon Hai chairman Liu Yangwei also officially took office today (1). It is generally believed that Hon Hai founder Terry Gou chose Liu Yangwei to take over as the new chairman in the hope that he can lead Hon Hai from its original electronic assembly outsourcing to a new era of semiconductors. Now that Liu Yangwei has officially taken office, whether it means that Hon Hai will enter the semiconductor era after Terry Gou retires has become a focus of continuous observation by the outside world.

Liu Yangwei is regarded by Terry Gou as the person who knows the most about semiconductors in Hon Hai Group. Looking back at Liu Yangwei's experience, he has a bachelor's degree in electronic physics from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan and a master's degree in electronic engineering and computer science from the University of Southern California. After entering the workplace, he founded a motherboard brand in the United States, which was later merged into Hon Hai. Liu Yangwei also served as the chairman of CRT monitor manufacturer Huasheng and the general manager of IC design Pucheng. Finally, he joined UMC Group and participated in the founding process of Lianyang and ITeX.

In 2007, Liu Yangwei joined the Hon Hai Group. His initial achievement was to let Hon Hai cooperate with Mozilla to jointly develop Firefox OS devices based on HTML 5 and open network technology. In addition, Liu Yangwei was also the leader in the early development of Hon Hai Kaohsiung Software Park. In 2017, Hon Hai established the Semiconductor Sub-Group (S Sub-Group), and Liu Yangwei took over as general manager. Later, he became a director of Sharp, becoming a key figure in the connection between Hon Hai and Sharp in the semiconductor field.

Terry Gou once said that Foxconn would definitely make semiconductors. Now that Liu Yangwei has officially taken over as the chairman of Foxconn, the industry believes that Foxconn will officially start its semiconductor layout.

However, if we look closely at Hon Hai's overall semiconductor layout, we can see that there is only one company, Xunxin Technology, which is responsible for packaging and testing, and another company, Jingding Technology, which is responsible for semiconductor equipment. Liu Yangwei is the chairman of Jingding Technology. However, judging from the scale of these two companies in the industry, compared with Hon Hai's global dominance in electronic foundry, Hon Hai can be said to have no say in the semiconductor industry.

What's more, the investment amount in the semiconductor industry is huge. The cost of a wafer factory alone often starts at tens of billions of US dollars. Considering the financial resources of Hon Hai Group, its ability to bear the cost on its own is really limited. Therefore, the most effective way is to continue to deepen the leading foundation that already exists, including front-end equipment research and development and back-end IC packaging and testing. Only by continuing to increase efforts can the benefits be relatively obvious.

In fact, Foxconn director Lu Fang-ming has already revealed that Foxconn is an integrator in the field of semiconductors and will not invest on its own. In other words, Liu Yangwei can use his experience and influence in the semiconductor field to enable Foxconn to find its own stage in the semiconductor industry, which is more beneficial than investing on its own and getting half the result with twice the effort.