Foxconn
- Officially:
- Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd.
What is Foxconn known for manufacturing?
When was Foxconn founded, and by whom?
What controversies has Foxconn faced?
What was the significance of Foxconn’s first factory in mainland China?
Foxconn is one of the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturing companies, known for making such devices as Apple iPhones and iPads, Microsoft Xboxes, Amazon Kindles, and Sony PlayStations. The company consistently appears on the Fortune Global 500 list and is one of the largest employers in the world. Foxconn is headquartered in New Taipei City, Taiwan.
Road to success
Foxconn was founded in Taiwan as Hon Hai Plastics Corporation in 1974 by Taiwanese businessman Terry Gou. The company started as a plastic parts manufacturer whose employees fashioned components for television sets and Atari consoles. The company then transitioned to manufacturing personal-computer components for such clients as Dell and Intel.
Foxconn’s first factory in mainland China, based just outside Shenzhen, Guangdong, was completed in 1988. In the following years, Gou provided the growing population of Shenzhen factory assembly workers with such necessities as housing in dormitories and food. The factory, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers, also provides medical care and has bakeries and banks. This initial investment ultimately led the company to grow exponentially, and by 2005 about 90 percent of the company’s net profits came from its operations in mainland China. In the mid-2010s Apple iPhones were being manufactured primarily at Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory.
The company’s revenue remained modest until after 2000, when it skyrocketed through strategic partnerships with large corporations, including Apple, Toshiba, Sony, and Microsoft. In 2010 Foxconn reached $100 billion in sales, and in the mid-2010s approximately half of its revenue was being generated from manufacturing electronics for Apple. By 2012 Foxconn accounted for 40 percent of the global consumer electronics market. The following year Foxconn ranked 30th on the Fortune Global 500 list.
Foxconn continued to flourish through the 2020s; it reported record sales of $208.2 billion in 2024. That year the company announced that it was partnering with American semiconductor company NVIDIA Corporation to integrate digital twin technology into Foxconn’s operations to improve its manufacturing processes.
Foxconn in the United States
In 2017 U.S. Pres. Donald Trump announced a deal with Foxconn to build a massive 1.9 million-square-meter (20 million-square-foot) plant to manufacture liquid crystal display (LCD) screens in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. The plan was part of his “America First” policy, which aimed to bring manufacturing jobs back to the country. The $10 billion investment plan—which was then the most significant venture by an overseas company in U.S. history—aimed to create 13,000 jobs and was expected to receive a $3 billion tax incentive package.
Construction of the complex began in 2018, and its groundbreaking ceremony was attended by Gou, Trump, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Although the project was scaled back from its initial plan, the plant had largely been completed by 2020. As of December 2024 Foxconn had received $9 million in state tax credits.
Despite the grand figures used to tout the project, the facility ended up generating just 1,100 jobs as of December 2024. Those who had lived where the facility was built had been given no say in the matter: the government had used eminent domain to declare land in the area “blighted,” and it destroyed residential properties to make way for the plant. Author Larry Tabak, who wrote about the lofty project, reported that Mount Pleasant spent more than $100 million on the project, which failed to deliver on Foxconn’s promises.
Other U.S. investments for Foxconn include plans, announced in June 2025, to put $450 million into an industrial complex in Houston. That same year the company was said to be forming a strategic partnership with TECO Electric & Machinery Co. to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in the United States and elsewhere.
Controversies
Despite its success, Foxconn has been criticized for failing to provide humane working conditions for its employees. In the 2010s multiple Foxconn workers at the Longhua complex in Shenzhen took their own lives by jumping off the company’s dorm building in acts that were widely viewed as protests against worker mistreatment. According to a Guardian report, there were 18 attempted suicides and 14 deaths. International media reported that workers were accusing the company of excessive work hours, toxic management practices, and unlivable wages. According to a Chinese broadcast interview, a Foxconn factory worker commented that he and his colleagues often worked more than 100 hours of overtime per month. Additionally, workers are housed in cramped dormitories, with as many as eight workers per room.
In early 2012 in Wuhan, Hubei, China, a group of about 150 employees gathered on a rooftop and protested their work conditions by threatening mass suicide. The employees stayed on the top floor of their factory for two days, until they were talked down by government officials and managers.
As news of the deaths and working conditions spread, some consumers became wary of how their iPhones and other consumer technologies had been built, and they compared the grueling work to modern-day slavery. Foxconn responded by setting up safety nets around the dorm buildings, covering windows with wire and locking them, and promising to improve working conditions through higher pay and fewer working hours. However, the safety measures sometimes led employees to feel worse; indeed, one 16-year-old employee complained of a “constricted feeling” brought about by the anti-suicide measures. Furthermore, the company reportedly had workers sign a letter stating that they would not kill themselves, which was widely viewed as giving the company protection against liability from employees’ suicides.
Foxconn has also been criticized for alleged racial and gender discrimination while recruiting. The American nonprofit organization China Labor Watch reported in 2023 that Foxconn had discriminated against ethnic minority groups, such as Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Yi and Hui people, by excluding them from employment consideration. The organization also revealed that the company had discriminated against pregnant women.
According to a 2024 Reuters investigation, the company’s main iPhone assembly factory in India excluded married women from consideration for hiring. Married women were reportedly refused interviews because it was thought that they would prioritize family matters over work. In response to the report, Foxconn instructed its India recruitment department to omit any criteria related to gender, marital status, or age. After the Reuters investigation, India’s National Human Rights Commission ordered federal investigators to examine the company’s hiring practices. The investigators interviewed executives and 21 married women employed by the company but did not review hiring documents or examine systemic issues, and it concluded that the company had not discriminated against certain groups. Because of such major lapses in the investigation, in late 2024 the commission ordered authorities to reinvestigate the matter.