According to a new report from Bloomberg, Foxconn is set to spend $2.6 billion building a new factory in Taiwan exclusively to create displays for Apple.
Equipment installation for the factory is likely to begin next month, with the aim of starting mass production of panels by the end of 2015. The factory will require hiring an addition workforce of 2,300 people, and is going to be built at Innolux’s Kaohsiung Science Park campus in Southern Taiwan.
Foxconn currently has factories in China dedicated to assembling iPhones and iPads, but this will be the company’s first designed entirely with the goal of producing Apple components to go inside the devices.
While Foxconn has previously looked to lessen its reliance on Apple, there’s no doubt that producing devices for the Cupertino company is one of the most lucrative contracts available to a manufacturer.
Having struggled to keep up with demand for the iPhone 6 despite hiring around 20,000 new employees, Foxconn’s move is likely designed to wrest back orders from Apple, which has shown a willingness to grant them to rival manufacturers like Pegatron, that have shown a willingness to expand rapidly to meet Apple’s demands.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
2 responses to “Foxconn to spend $2.6 billion building a factory exclusively for Apple”
Fantastic! Nothing like US company employing thousands of Chinese and pumping billions of US dollars into their economy so they can buy up what unemployed US citizens can no longer afford to own!!!
So explain to me again Republicans, how are these big businesses creating US jobs?
It’s a pretty simple economic question really…
Why build a huge factory in the US where you’ll have to hire union employees at 2 or 3 times the rate and pay higher taxes?
You can thank Unions for driving the cost of labor up to unreasonably levels and you can think progressives (democrats and republicans) for our excessively high corporate tax rates.
The sad part is there are american’s who would gladly do this work at the same price but they would be scorned by their union brothers and called rats for doing it. The unions would rather have no jobs than lower paying ones.