Taiwanese pioneer of contract electronics manufacturing. The company was instrumental in training China's vast but largely unskilled labour force in the 1990s. Its founder, Terry Gou, is credited with being a deft political operator who persuaded local governments in China to provide big subsidies, allowing Foxconn to buy the world's best machinery for its Chinese factories and giving them an edge over rivals.
Foxconn became Apple's principal manufacturer, producing first the iPod and then the iPhone. The low costs of Foxconn's Chinese operations forced competitors to move to China too, until it became too expensive to manufacture electronics anywhere else. Critics said conditions at Foxconn were inhumane; several workers committed suicide.
Foxconn has two plants in Shanxi province, once the hope for broadening that coal-dependent region's industrial base. Shifting supply chains have hit them hard: America imported 47% of its smartphones from China in the first half of 2025, down from 81% the year before, and Shanxi's exports shrank by 33% in the second quarter of 2025, the biggest drop of any province.
Foxconn is Apple's biggest supplier and now assembles nearly one in five of its iPhones in India. It pledged $1.5bn to expand its Indian operations, as Apple hopes to make all the handsets it sells in America in Indian plants by 2026.
Robots that were previously used by Foxconn to put the circular "home" button on earlier generations of iPhones were repurposed to install microchips—an example of how software-driven reprogramming has improved the lifetime return on investment in industrial robots.
Foxconn is building fully robotic factories in America, run via AI-created simulations ("digital twins") using Nvidia technology. The factories are part of a broader effort to shift manufacturing away from China. Some will eventually produce AI-powered robots—humanoid and otherwise—to offset American labour shortages.
In June 2025 Foxconn withdrew more than 300 Chinese engineers from India, apparently as part of a co-ordinated Chinese effort to slow the creation of alternative supply chains. The restricted flow of Chinese machine tools and dysprosium, a rare-earth element, has slowed production of iPhones and AirPods in India.
Sources: The Economist, May 21st 2025; June 14th 2025; August 14th 2025
Heller's Law: The first myth of management is that it exists. Johnson's Corollary: Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within the organization.