During an earnings conference call, Inventec's CEO said that Apple's HomePod would have little material impact on the company's future results as quantities of the device will probably be constrained at launch -- with other reports claiming that Foxconn will handle half of the manufacturing duties in 2018.
Speaking to investors, Inventec CEO David Ho confirmed that the HomePod would ship to Apple in the fourth fiscal quarter, with tight constraints.
"We will finally ship the smart home device this year," said Ho. "But, its [earnings] contribution will be fairly limited and hopefully that will improve next year"
After the conference call, an analyst predicted that Inventec would likely only ship 500,000 units of the HomePod in 2017. For that half-million, Inventec's revenue is predicted to only increase less than one percent.
An unnamed source within Inventec told the Nikkei Asian Review on Monday that the HomePod would in part shift to rival Foxconn in 2018 at some point -- but when specifically was not made clear.
Apple's $349 HomePod was revealed at the 2017 WWDC and will ship in December. The HomePod is powered by an Apple A8 chip featuring realtime acoustic modeling, audio beam-forming, and multi-channel echo cancelation. It features a subset of Siri, optimized for music consumption.