The UK’s Register is quoting an ON.CC report (in Chinese, Google translation here) that Foxconn, which has seen a rash of suicides at its Shenzhen plant recently, will close down its entire operation in Mainland China. The Irish Times, however, is reporting that, “Taiwanese electronics maker Foxconn says it is considering moving some of its production back to the self-ruled island where it has its headquarters.”
So it is unclear what exactly the company is thinking right now regarding its future in China. Foxconn has about 800,000 employees throughout Mainland China, and has said that the labor-intensive approach that it’s taken in China is probably not sustainable long term.
Foxconn of course most famously produces the iPhone for Apple (which has reportedly ordered 24 million iPhone 4′s for 2010 from Foxconn, and Jobs at D8: Foxconn is not a sweatshop), but the manufacturer also supplies products for numerous other multinationals. The Register report says that parent company Hon Hai Group will move the Mainland operations to Vietnam, Taiwan and India.
The suicides are of course tragic and still the main story. However, if Foxconn were to move all or a significant portion at least of its operations out of Mainland China, this could have far reaching implications not only to tech hardware prices worldwide, but also could have a (probably small) negative impact on China’s economy (even in China, 800,000 jobs are still kind of a lot), and perhaps even a bigger impact might be on the general bad taste the entire incident has left on the country, especially around labor relations and conditions on the Mainland.
“indecent” should be “incident”
thank you for noticing the typo, fixed!
Good, they should have been shut down a long time ago!
anon-posting.at.tc
people never get the entire story about this. The amount of suicides when averaged out based on how many people are employed there is actually LESS than the national average in the United States. Everyone likes to position this story as a sweat shop operation but thats just not the case, not even close. When you employ tens of thousands of people, theres a good chance a few of them might be a little crazy and kill themselves ITS JUST A PART OF LIFE (unfortunately).
Holy crap… This is huge news. Once china start building labor unions will be the day.
Closing down in China sounds like a bad idea, but maybe they think China is getting too expensive. Taiwan is no less expensive though.
As always, production is moved to the cheapest place, so I’ve heard Vietnam, Cambodia etc are next, and Africa maybe later, but soon enough production cost will go up generally.
The production cost for the iPhone is tiny compared to the consumer price, and Apple is taking a hefty margin on each unit. That’s where the main issue is. Remember, a Mac has the same components as a PC, still the Mac is often twice the price. Because of better components? No way.
don’t care as long as I can get my new iphone on time.
The US average for school suicides is 7.29 per year for every 100,000 students. Cornell, with 19,639 students, had six suiides this academic year. Majority of workers at the Foxconn Longhua site are between 18 and 24, many of which came to urbanized Shenzhen from rural areas inland. Foxconn is being more proactive then any European or America country would be with this issue. How many military suicides are there a year in the same age group accross the EU or US? Much more, but no one wants to adress that.