Foxconn’s empty buildings, empty factories, and empty promises in Wisconsin

by aeontech on 10/30/2020, 3:26 AM with 19 comments
  • by tsjq on 10/30/2020, 6:12 AM

    10days ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24831809

    https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wi...

    [off topic] If R wins this time, it is a huge failure on the so many protests & rallies: to not have converted those into votes against R .

  • by baron816 on 10/30/2020, 5:26 AM

    Republican state leaders sure do talk a lot about being pro-business. It is interesting that California and Washington headquarter all four of the world’s trillion dollar public companies, plus a boatload of $100B+ companies, and vibrant startup centers.

    Businesses care about things other than low taxes. Hiring well educated and talented people is certainly top of the list. States that want to grow their economies should focus on making attracting/maintaining/developing those types of people. That means focusing on livability (livability != low cost of living).

  • by sharadov on 10/30/2020, 4:03 AM

    "In Vietnam in 2007, in Brazil in 2011, in Pennsylvania in 2013, and in Indonesia in 2014, Foxconn announced enormous factories that either fell far short of promises or never appeared."

    Wow! Smoke and mirrors on an epic scale!

  • by moltar on 10/30/2020, 4:38 AM

    This is what happens when governments meddle with a free market by offering tax cuts and cash incentives. The businesses optimize for the wrong thing.

  • by aeontech on 10/30/2020, 5:58 AM

    Excellent reporting, I think.

    It’s offering some fascinating insight into Foxconn internals where warring fiefdoms of business units mean insane amounts of wasted human effort (not that that is unique to Foxconn).

    That also offers an interesting contrast to the recent post on Apple internal organization of the business into functional lines instead of product units (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24903764)

  • by _RPL5_ on 10/30/2020, 6:38 AM

    I don't understand what Foxconn's endgame is.

    Did they really have a good-faith plan to build a mega factory going into this? And then they failed because of befuddling incompetence as the article suggests? Or did they do the whole thing as a Potemkin village to curry favor with the Trump administration? If so, where did they cash it in? Seems convoluted.

    Occam's razor says it was incompetence, but how does Foxconn get on in the world if they are so dysfunctional? Shouldn't they be bankrupt by now?