Hon Hai announces entry into mobile game industry

November 2, 2013 Leave a comment

Hon Hai announces entry into mobile game industry

Kang Wenrou and Staff Reporter

2013-11-02

Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer by revenue, will introduce its first mobile phone games within six months, entering the field of digital content to forge a new business territory for itself, our sister paper the Taipei-based China Times reports, citing Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou. Whether it’s easier to enter the hardware industry from the software industry, or vice versa, Gou believes that transitioning either way has its strengths and weaknesses.After finding out about Hon Hai’s plan, Wayi International Digital Entertainment Co, a Taiwanese game software firm, said it was not concerned at Hon Hai’s entry into the sector but rather expressed a willingness to cooperate with the hardware giant. Wayi has since said that the rapid rise of the mobile game industry means that Chinese companies, which are larger in size, have entered the Taiwanese market without need of local agents, with smaller players from Taiwan being left on the sidelines.

Wayi hopes Hon Hai’s entry will push the limits of development for the whole mobile game industry, with all sides jointly expanding the scale of the market, said the firm’s unnamed spokesperson.

Hon Hai, better known internationally by its trading name Foxconn, will not only manufacture games consoles but will also produce game content, Gou said. Currently, the company will focus on producing game products for mobile phones, and the results would be presented in six months at the earliest, he said. The integration of software and hardware is an inevitable trend, and even Microsoft has had to get involved in hardware manufacturing, Gou said.

Gou Shou-cheng, Gou’s eldest son, used to focus on the cultural and creative industries though it didn’t work out for him. The father and son will develop the new field independently, the report said.

Hon Hai will focus its game development in the Kaohsiung software market, related company officials said. Recently, Hon Hai announced it will set up a joint venture in China to explore the online education market, and Hon Hai might team up with its mainland partners in the game industry in the future, the report said.

Regarding a recent comment by Kai-Fu Lee, the chairman of Innovation Works, when he said that hardware manufacturers such as Hon Hai and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s biggest microchip foundry, are relics of the past, Gou said the role that the two companies, and others like them play will always exist because hardware is a necessary for gaming.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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