Hon Hai offers Renault a lifeline, says open to buying its stake in Nissan

By Jane Lanhee Lee

 

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. is open to buying Renault SA’s stake in Nissan Motor Co., a move that may offer the struggling Japanese carmaker a lifeline.

 

The Taiwanese company has approached Nissan and Honda Motor Co. about potential cooperation, Hon Hai Chairman Young Liu told reporters on Wednesday on the sidelines of a company event. Liu also said his firm will announce a new Japanese customer for its EV contract manufacturing business in the first quarter, though he didn’t specify the name or scale of production in brief remarks.

 

Apple Inc.’s main production partner had previously considered picking up the French firm’s 36 per cent slice of Nissan. Hon Hai, for years the largest manufacturer of iPhones and electronics for global brands, has been venturing into newer arenas such as electric vehicles to offset stalling smartphone sales. 

 

The company, known also as Foxconn, had adopted a wait-and-see attitude while Honda and Nissan worked out a plan to integrate their businesses, Bloomberg News has reported. The Japanese carmakers are now thinking of ending their alliance talks. 

 

“If there’s an operational need, we will consider it,” Liu told reporters when Bloomberg News asked if Foxconn would buy Renault’s stake in Nissan. “But buying the stake isn’t our goal — our goal is cooperation.”

 

Nissan’s shares briefly pared losses in Tokyo Wednesday following Liu’s comments, before resuming their slide. The stock price was down 6.5 per cent during afternoon trade. 

 

A representative for Honda declined to comment on whether or not there was a meeting with Hon Hai. A Nissan spokesman said the company was aware of the reports but declined to comment further.

 

Nissan has struggled for years with revolving-door leadership and an outdated lineup of unpopular cars. A combination with Honda would have created one of the biggest carmakers in the world, with more scale to grapple with the fast pace of change brought on by competition from nimbler upstarts and improved battery efficiency. In China, Japanese automakers are losing ground to local manufacturers led by BYD Co., while their supply chains — built over decades — are particularly challenged by the growing shift to EVs.

 

Hon Hai’s involvement might help Nissan survive as a company, Daiwa Securities Senior Strategist Shuji Hosoi said. “But it’s by no means clear that this would protect jobs or be good for the Japanese economy,” he said, adding that this was his personal view, not the brokerage’s. “There’s a big risk that Nissan might be reduced to an assembly manufacturer, in the same manner as Sharp.” 

 

Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp. was on the brink of bankruptcy when it received a capital injection from Hon Hai in 2016.

 

Over the past year, Hon Hai has benefited from surging demand for the Nvidia Corp. servers that power AI development. But in EVs, the world’s largest contract electronics maker has been unable to gain a sure footing.

 

“From Hon Hai’s point of view, it is not a merger case but a partnership,” Liu said when asked about a possible merger with Nissan. “How can we partner with Japanese automakers? We met with many companies and Nissan and Honda are among them.”