Foxconn has announced a strategic partnership with Thales Group of France in the fields of semiconductors and space, a move that deepens the industrial expertise and broadens the European footprint of one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturing service providers.
Announced at Choose France, an economic summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron, the first of two MOUs for Foxconn could aggregate additional European industrial investors to sustain an investment in excess of €250 million while ensuring a strong European leadership in an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) facility.
Foxconn is exploring the potential in preliminary discussions with government-backed Thales and Radiall, a French connector and component maker. If successfully concluded, the facility would address the European aerospace, automotive, space telecoms, and defence advanced packaging markets, while bringing together other European industrial investors.
The OSAT project would use fan-out wafer level packaging (FOWLP), which would make such a facility a first in the second-largest economy of the European Union. With this development, Foxconn deepens its industrial expertise and global footprint, strengthening the resilience of the supply chain and making key investments in new businesses.
The second MOU covers the domain of satellite constellations. Combining Foxconn’s advanced manufacturing and space technologies of Thales Alenia Space, a Joint Venture between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), this initiative aims at exploring the value of developing together high quality/high-value series satellite production in order to provide superior technological content to customers for their large telecommunications satellite constellation projects in Low Earth Orbit.
Foxconn is an emerging stakeholder in the space ecosystem, launching its own low earth orbit CubeSat in 2023 as proof-of-concept, expanding its next-generation beyond 5G (B5G) capabilities and entering satellite constellation manufacturing with the aim to industrialise the LEO sector with its half-century of ICT experience.
