William Gallagher
Foxconn has told investors that it has the capacity to produce iPhones for the American market without using its Chinese facilities, potentially skirting possible US/China trade tariffs.
Specifically, a senior executive says that Foxconn can make enough iPhones to supply the entire US market and do so out in territories that would avoid incurring any US/China tariffs.
According to Bloomberg, Young Liu, semiconductor division chief at Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn, was speaking at an investor briefing in Taipei.
"Twenty-five percent of our production capacity is outside of China," he said, "and we can help Apple respond to its needs in the US market. We have enough capacity to meet Apple's demand."
Liu confirmed that Apple has not requested such a move yet, nor did he detail which Foxconn facilities might be used after such a move. He was telling investors that Foxconn is able to move quickly and change its use of facilities in different countries to avoid such trade wars.
Foxconn has previously been investigating moving iPhone production to India and to Vietnam.
Bloomberg says that Liu gave Foxconn's decision to build a base in Wisconsin as an example of its worldwide production capability. That operation has been controversially delayed and changed but other company executives reportedly reaffirmed Foxconn's commitment to the US state.
It plans to hire up to 2,000 people by the end of 2020, though this is is substantially fewer than the 13,000 originally promised.
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41 Comments
Impressive and Awesome.
Worth doing some numbers.
Apple roughly ships 200M iPhone, 100M of those are not the latest, i.e iPhone 8 and below. Foxconn in India already has the ability to assemble those phones if and when needed. It is only a matter of scale.
US has roughly 30% of Apple's revenue, so assuming in perfect scale ( which won't be the case but for the sake of numbers ), Foxconn will need to assemble 15M older generation iPhone and 15M latest iPhone outside of China.
Amazing the power of propaganda to, in short order, and without evidence, label an entire country a dangerous enemy. While a country that actually attacked us and continues to attack us is labelled as a friend. And then to watch supposedly intelligent, mature people and organizations jump on the bandwagon.
Sad and scary.