Foxconn at a Glance
Foxconn has finally arrived on American soil but what is this company and what does it do?
Foxconn Technology Group is a contract manufacturing company for electronic. That means Foxconn manufactures devices for other companies such as Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL).
Basically, Foxconn is a private-label manufacturer that builds products sold under company’s brand names. That makes it similar to the private label companies in the food industry that are sold at stores like Aldi and Kroger (NYSE: KR).
Foxconn Fun Facts
Here are a few tidbits of information about Foxconn for you to digest:
- Also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd.
- Based in Taiwan.
- Trades on the Taipei stock exchange under the ticker symbols TWSE: 2317 or TPE: 2354.
- Foxconn is the fourth largest information technology by revenue.
- Foxconn reported $34.1 billion dollars in revenues for 1st Quarter 2018.
- Foxconn’s revenues grew by 83.8% between March 2017 and March 2018.
- Foxconn reported revenues of $158.15 billion US dollars or 4.71 Taiwan dollars for 2017, according to Statista.
- Founded in 1974.
- Famous products made by Foxconn include the iPhone, BlackBerry, iPad, iPod, Kindle, Echo, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wi U, Xbox One, and Nokia devices.
Foxconn Makes 50,000 iPhones a Day
- It was estimated that Foxconn manufactured 40% of the world’s electronics in 2012.
- Half of all iPhones are manufactured at one Foxconn plant in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, The South China Morning Post reported.
- Foxconn’s 94 production lines for the iPhone employ 350,000 people in Zhengzhou.
- Foxconn’s factory in Zhengzhou churns out 50,000 iPhones a day.
- Foxconn made headlines in 2010 because of an epidemic of worker suicides.
- The secrecy at Foxconn factories is intense. A Reuters journalist was once beaten up by security goons for taking pictures outside the factory walls, The Guardian charged.
- Nobody can enter a Foxconn factory in China without submitting to a fingerprint scan.
- Foxconn is the second largest employer in China.
- Foxconn is the third largest employer in the world with 1.3 million employees. Only Walmart (NYSE: WMT) and McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD) employ more people.
- Foxconn CEO Terry Ghou once had large nets placed outside factories to catch workers trying to commit suicide by jumping off the roofs.
Foxconn Accused of Not Paying Workers
- Amazon admitted that thousands of Foxconn workers building Kindles and Echos were not legally paid in June 2018, The Guardian reported.
- Some workers making Amazon products at Foxconn factories in China make $269.53 amonth, The Guardian That works out to a wage of $1.68 an hour – if the employees work 40 hours a week.
- A more detailed expose of Foxconn’s relationship with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) can be found in Brian Merchant’s book The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.
- Foxconn has plans to replace 80% of its workers with robots within five years, Yahoo Finance reported.
- Foxconn builds robots, it was manufacturing 10,000 Foxbots a year in 2017, The Verge reported.
Foxconn Arrives in America
Foxconn broke ground on its first US factory in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, just outside Racine, on June 28, 2018.
