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進入《TAIPEI TIMES 焦點》Gou wins support for Toshiba bid
/ Staff writer, with CNA
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co （鴻海精密） is to join forces with US technology giants Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc in its bid for the semiconductor business of Japan’s Toshiba Corp, the firm’s chairman said in an interview with a Japanese newspaper yesterday.
“Of course, Apple and Amazon are offering money, but I cannot comment on how much funds each company is putting on the table,” Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou （郭台銘） said in an interview with the Nikkei Asian Review.
Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group （富士康） outside Taiwan, has been bidding for Toshiba Memory, which was put up for sale in February to cover the losses of Toshiba’s nuclear energy business in the US market.
Apple and Amazon reportedly had been separately bidding for Toshiba Memory, but Gou said in the interview that the firms would take part in Hon Hai’s bid.
Among the five bidders for Toshiba Memory so far, Hon Hai — which assembles iPads and iPhones for Apple — has made the highest offer of about ￥2 trillion （US$18.2 billion） and has entered the second round of bidding, the Nikkei Asian Review said.
In the interview, Gou said Hon Hai would be able to offer recommendations on how to build the right memory components for future gadgets based on its solid experience in smartphone and server chip production.
“We really hope to help Toshiba design better products in the future,” he said.
The report said there have been rising concerns that Toshiba’s sophisticated memorychip technology might be leaked to China if its semiconductor business is sold to Hon Hai, a contract manufacturer with sprawling production facilities in China.
Gou dismissed such fears as unfounded.
“Since Foxconn was founded all those years ago, I have been building the business with my own money and accumulating my own funds and I have been investing with my own profits,” he said. “I have never taken a dime” from others.
He said that if Hon Hai’s acquisition bid succeeds, it would guarantee bank loans for Toshiba Memory and would not dispose of the company solely for profit.
“We let Japanese [managers] run Sharp Corp ... we are also hoping that Toshiba’s memory unit will survive for the next 50 to 100 years at least, like Sharp,” Gou said.
He was referring to Hon Hai’s handling of Sharp since acquiring a majority stake in the Japanese company in August last year.
Sharp and Hon Hai are planning to set up a semiconductor plant in the US, if the bid for Toshiba Memory succeeds, the Kyodo news agency said in May, citing unnamed sources within Sharp.
新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES
