TAIPEI, April 5 (Reuters) - Taiwan's Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics maker, reported a 29.7% on-year rise in first-quarter revenue on strong demand for artificial intelligence products, though it cautioned about "volatile" global politics.
Revenue for Nvidia's biggest server maker and Apple's top iPhone assembler jumped to T$2.13 trillion ($66.60 billion), Foxconn said in a statement on Sunday.
That was slightly below the T$2.148 trillion LSEG SmartEstimate, which gives greater weight to forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.
Strong AI demand led to robust revenue growth for its cloud and networking products division. Smart consumer electronics, which includes iPhones, posted "significant" growth thanks to new product launches, the company said.
March revenue alone rose 45.6% on-year to T$803.7 billion, a record for that month.
Operations are expected to grow both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year in the second quarter, with AI racks maintaining a continued growth trend, the company said.
However, "it remains necessary to monitor the impact of the volatile global political and economic situation", Foxconn said, without elaborating.
Last month, Chairman Young Liu said the biggest external challenge this year for the company was the global economic and political situation, especially the war in the Middle East.
Foxconn, formally called Hon Hai Precision Industry, does not provide numerical forecasts. It will report full first-quarter earnings on May 14.
Foxconn's shares have dropped 16% this year, underperforming the 12% rise for the Taiwan market. The stock closed down 2% on Thursday ahead of the revenue data release, broadly in line with the benchmark index.
Taiwan's financial markets were closed on Friday for a holiday and will resume trade on Tuesday.
($1 = 31.9800 Taiwan dollars)
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Kevin Buckland)
