New high for the same period! Foxconn's April revenue increased by nearly 30% year-on-year, with strong demand for AI servers.

NVIDIA Corporation's main partner, Foxconn Precision (2317.TW), announced a 29.7% revenue growth in April, highlighting continued strong spending in key artificial intelligence hardware. Foxconn's sales in April reached 832.1 billion New Taiwan Dollars (approximately 26.3 billion US dollars), setting a new record for the same period in history. Analysts on average expect Foxconn's second-quarter revenue to grow by 30.4%. In the revenue structure for April, the "components and other" and "cloud network" categories performed exceptionally well. Foxconn attributed this to the "strong momentum of AI cloud products", showing significant growth month-on-month and year-on-year. In contrast, the consumer intelligence category (mainly covering Apple Inc. (AAPL.US) iPhone and MacBook consumer electronics assembly business) recorded a "slight decline" month-on-month in April, and was the only product category to show negative year-on-year growth for that month. Looking at the cumulative performance for the first four months, this category's year-on-year performance was only "flat". Foxconn's explanation was that "the high base period was padded by new product launches in the previous month", but looking at a longer time frame, the gap in growth between consumer electronics and AI cloud, the two major engines, is accelerating. Behind this structural differentiation is a historic shift in the focus of the company's business. Foxconn's revenue share of cloud network products has now increased to approximately 40%, with AI servers rising from a peripheral business in the past to the group's core growth driver. This proportion was only at around 22% in early 2025, nearly doubling in just over a year. In its statement on Tuesday, Foxconn acknowledged that the second quarter is the traditional off-season for the ICT industry, with major products currently in a "period of transition between old and new models". However, the company also provided a key assessment - "only AI cabinets will continue to show growth trends", and based on current visibility, the second quarter is expected to show quarterly and yearly increases. In the face of fluctuations in the global political and economic situation, this assessment becomes a key window for observing the real demand strength of the AI supply chain. Orders from North American cloud giants anchor The reason Foxconn dares to maintain an optimistic outlook during the traditional off-season is fundamentally supported by the massive capital expenditures locked in by its end customers. Alphabet, Amazon.com, Inc., Meta Platforms, and Microsoft Corporation - the world's four largest cloud computing super-scale manufacturers have announced a combined investment of $725 billion in AI by 2026, far exceeding previous expectations. Just the week before, Meta had just completed a bond issue of between $25 to $30 billion to finance the construction of AI data centers; Amazon.com, Inc. has raised nearly $54 billion in two separate rounds in the United States and Europe in March. Alphabet also returned to the Eurobond market, selling Euro-denominated bonds in six tranches, further raising its full-year capital expenditure guidance for 2026 to between $180 billion and $190 billion. The flow of these billion-dollar debt financings is precisely the order book of Foxconn and other AI server system contract manufacturers. From Foxconn's position in NVIDIA Corporation's supply chain, its order visibility has extended to future two generations of chip architecture. Currently, NVIDIA Corporation's GB300 has entered small-scale production and will become the main product for AI server shipments in the first half of 2026; the Vera Rubin platform will take over production in the second half of the year, with the potential to continue until 2027. At the NVIDIA Corporation GTC conference in March, Foxconn showcased an AI server cabinet solution with the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 - compared to the Blackwell NVL72, its inference performance has improved by 5 times, training performance by 3.5 times, and inference costs have been reduced by tenfold. More importantly, the continuous improvement in market share. Institutional estimates show that Foxconn shipped approximately 12,000 NVIDIA Corporation GB series server cabinets in 2025, with a market share of about 43%. With core clients such as Alphabet Inc. Class C, Amazon.com, Inc. AWS, and Microsoft Corporation driving demand, Foxconn's market share is expected to rise to 55% to 60% in 2026. This means that in the core race for AI servers, Foxconn is evolving from an "important participant" to an "absolute leader." Morgan Stanley's latest research report further supports this trend. Shipments of NVL72 cabinets with NVIDIA Corporation's GB200 and GB300 architecture are rapidly increasing, with global production reaching approximately 6,500 units in February 2026, an increase of about 6% from the previous month. The total annual shipments are expected to reach 70,000 to 80,000 units, nearly doubling the scale of approximately 29,000 units in 2025, with Foxconn, Wistron, and Quanta being considered the most significant beneficiaries. Expansion plans are also progressing in sync. Foxconn Chairman Liu Yangwei previously revealed that the company can currently produce over 1,000 AI data center cabinets weekly, with plans to increase capacity to 2,000 cabinets per week by the end of 2026. It is noteworthy that Foxconn's management has clearly stated in talks with Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. that the United States is expected to become its largest AI server production base by 2026; the position previously held by Mexico will transition to on-shore production capacity, while Taiwan will continue to serve as a research and development center. Apple Inc. variable: A new narrative in consumer electronics may be brewing If AI servers are the main growth trend for Foxconn, then the new variable on the Apple Inc. side could provide a potential revaluation trigger for the consumer electronics sector. Traditionally, a significant portion of Foxconn's revenue comes from assembling Apple Inc.'s iPhone and MacBook, and is expected to benefit from the strong response to the latest iPhone 17 product series. The iPhone 17 has received unexpectedly positive market feedback due to the deep integration of AI features and design changes, with Apple Inc. requesting Foxconn to increase production capacity by about 30% to meet pre-order demand. However, the more imaginative variable comes from foldable screens. According to industry sources in early April, Foxconn has started trial production of Apple Inc.'s first foldable screen iPhone, with shipping targets set for the second half of 2026. The first product will be a large foldable screen model with a book-style horizontal folding design. Tianfeng International analyst Ming-Chi Kuo estimates that Apple Inc. has planned orders for 15 to 20 million units for this model, and as the exclusive assembler, Foxconn has set up dedicated production lines in Shenzhen and Zhengzhou industrial parks, entering the design verification and trial production phase. If the product is released as planned in September, it will be the biggest product design change since the iPhone X in 2017, with an expected price range of $2,000 to $2,500, setting a new ceiling for iPhone prices. Counterpoint predicts that Apple Inc. will achieve a 28% share of the global foldable screen market in its debut year, making a significant incremental contribution to Foxconn's consumer electronics sector. However, this positive impact on revenue may not be felt until the second half of the year, as second-quarter data may continue to reflect the "transition between old and new" off-season characteristics.