Foxconn Confirms Plans for U.S. Investment
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
50,000 employees is small for Foxconn. They have 1,300,000 employees now. (Yes, they really are that big.) They replaced 60,000 workers with robots earlier in 2016.[1] They plan to replace a lot more.
Having your manufacturing based in one country isn't a good idea in terms of risk management.
Natural disasters, shipping delays, or presidential will could shut down production pretty quickly.
Trump will be very quick to use this as a point to show he was correct. I'd expect Foxconn to get some very good concessions out of this. SoftBank's Masayoshi continues to amaze me. Instead of talking tough about Trump's local manufacturing bluster, he quickly accepted it and started deal making with this new reality.
I'm no political expert but Id' be very surprised if Trump doesn't start picking fights with other governments about manufacturing jobs and tariffs. Companies and supply chains who don't anticipate this are going to be in for a rough 4 years.
Bloomberg's SPLC<GO> function is going to get alot more use in the coming days/weeks as people start to map out who is bring jobs back to America and who is standing firm:)
Masayoshi smartly saw that with some spin, he can hold a press conference with Trump and get some goodies for something they were going to do anyways. Smart guy. Your tax dollars at work.
> Your tax dollars at work.
I'm not an American:)
Or is this some BS from Foxconn just to keep Trump happy? Sure, agree to invest, make plans, delay it as much as possible, etc.
"Son is no stranger to grand goals, even if he hasn’t always delivered. He planned to combine Sprint, the No. 4 U.S. wireless operator, with its next rival T-Mobile US Inc. only to be thwarted by regulators. "
TMUS is up 16% since the election vs the S&P500 at 5%.
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ATMUS&ei=eoRIWNnNIs...
The telecom sector in general is soaring on M&A speculation.
1. It's likely Foxconn had already decided this well in advance of the 2016 election cycle. So him winning the election and this projected deal aren't related.
2. Even if him winning the election may have affected the decision it's still not him doing this, it's Foxconn. And the fact he's promoting this deal makes him the stooge for Foxconn. All he did was give them free PR (I hope his advisors told him that). So for a man who claims to have good business sense he basically did something for free.
3. The tax dollars don't matter, it's the fact Trump is like the soupstone guy from the fable. He didn't contribute anything. He produced exactly no value here.
I was in the factory that makes Apple Earpods. They are one of Apple's highest produced products because they ship with all their iOS devices. All the assembly was done by hand. They were proud that they added a robot to the line. Do you know what the robot did? It moved parts from one station to another station 12 feet away. They previously had a human doing that.
One recent example was flooding in Thailand that really hit the hard drive market hard.
Doing this experiment for a week is demonstrating how inseparable the political aspects of these stories are, and how "just ban politics" is not an answer to the flamewar and incivility problems that HN faces. So when it's done, our current thinking is to revert to the status quo ante, with some additional guidelines to encourage civility and to ask people not to use the site primarily for politics.