The US government’s tariff announcements have become a “big headache” for technology companies such as iPhone maker Apple and cloud service provider Amazon, their manufacturing partner Foxconn said on Friday, in a rare public admission of the disruption caused by President Donald Trump’s erratic trade policy.
“The issue of tariffs is something that is giving the CEOs of our customers a big headache now,” chief executive Young Liu told investors on an earnings call. “Judging by the attitude and the approach we see the US government taking towards tariffs, it is very, very hard to predict how things will develop over the next year. So we can only concentrate on doing well what we can control.”
Liu said the company’s customers were “one after another” hatching plans for co-operating with Foxconn on manufacturing in the US. He declined to give details as those plans were not yet finalised, but said there should be “more and more” manufacturing in the US.
The world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer assembles the vast majority of the world’s iPhones for Apple and also makes a broad range of other electronics products, including laptops, servers, robots, medical equipment and electric vehicles.
Foxconn itself is affected by Washington’s attempts to force more manufacturing to move onshore. The lion’s share of its manufacturing capacity is in China — recently hit by an additional 10 per cent US tariff — India and Vietnam, which are both likely targets for Trump’s planned reciprocal tariffs. Foxconn is also building what it said last October would be the world’s largest factory for Nvidia Blackwell servers in Mexico, where Trump has slapped a 25 per cent tariff on its exports to the US.
Foxconn forecast its information and communication products business, dominated by its contract work for Apple, would be stable this year. “But under the uncertainties related to geopolitics and tariffs, manufacturing will face challenges and demand might also suffer,” Liu said, adding that the company would work closely with customers to adjust its global footprint.
But the Taiwanese group gave a bullish outlook for AI servers. The company’s server assembly revenue increased 78 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2024 compared with the same period a year earlier, and it said it expected the AI server business to more than double in the current quarter.
Liu said he did not share concerns that cloud service providers might cut spending this year. He said the success of Chinese AI company DeepSeek in developing a large language model with smaller hardware investment was likely to encourage larger numbers of medium-sized companies to develop their own LLMs, further boosting server demand.
Driven by that strong growth, cloud and networking products would account for half the company’s revenue this year, overtaking the consumer electronics business, which has long weighed on Foxconn’s margins with its low-margin smartphone assembly operations.
Foxconn reported a surprise 13 per cent year-on-year drop in net profit for the fourth quarter. Net earnings slid to NT$46.3bn (US$1.4bn) in the three months to the end of December, but the decrease was due to a drop in non-operating income, while operating profit increased by 32 per cent.
