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TOKYO (Reuters) - Taiwan's Foxconn sees Japan as a big opportunity for growing its electric vehicle business and hopes to agree on partnerships with Japanese companies as soon as possible, an executive in charge of the business said on Wednesday.
Foxconn's interest in working with Japanese automakers comes as they face a threat from Chinese brands that have turned to battery-powered vehicles to aggressively win share in markets such as Europe, Brazil and Thailand.
"Automakers are scattered all over the world," Jun Seki, Foxconn's Chief Strategy Officer for EVs told a Tokyo seminar for laying out its EV strategy to Japanese companies.
"We will of course work with all of these customers, but there are several points where we feel we have a strong affinity with Japan," Seki, a former senior Nissan executive, said.
The contract manufacturer is set to introduce an electric bus and a battery-powered microbus in Japan in 2027, it said. It focuses on providing business-to-business services with its EV operations instead of targeting consumers directly.
Foxconn wants to cooperate with Nissan but is currently not engaging with the struggling Japanese automaker, Seki told the Nikkei newspaper in an interview published earlier on Wednesday.
In the interview, he also said it was a great idea for Foxconn to be part of a potential broader partnership with Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors and confirmed that Foxconn was finalising a deal with Mitsubishi - Nissan's junior partner - to supply it with EVs.
Foxconn was working with Mitsubishi, Seki said during Wednesday's event, without providing further details. Sources had previously told Reuters that Mitsubishi plans to outsource the production of EVs for Oceania markets to Foxconn.
In February, Nikkei reported that Foxconn had proposed partnering with Honda with an ultimate aim of creating a four-way framework that would also include Nissan and Mitsubishi after Honda-Nissan merger talks collapsed.
Foxconn has previously said it would consider taking a stake in Nissan, but that its main aim was cooperation.
(Reporting by Daniel Leussink and Maki Shiraki; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim, Jamie Freed and Hugh Lawson)
