During the evening of July 21, Hon Hai Group (鴻海集團) held an emergency press conference at its headquarters in Taipei County’s Tucheng (土城) after a Chinese contract worker from its flat-panel subsidiary Chimei Innoux Corp (奇美電子) died after a fall from a company dormitory.
While chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) did not show up to face the media, chief financial officer Huang Chiu-lien (黃秋蓮) did stand on the frontline and was poised to repair the electronics maker’s tarnished reputation following the tragic deaths of several of its Chinese workers.
“Chimei is a publicly listed firm and is run by professional managers .... Hon Hai does not get involved in the company’s management,” Huang said as she sought to contain the most serious image crisis the company had faced in its 36-year history.
“This [the death] should be seen as a separate case,” Huang said, trying to cut any links between the death of a Chimei employee with those that happened at Hon Hai Precision Industry Co’s (鴻海精密) Chinese manufacturing center, Longhua factories in Shenzhen, which employs 450,000 workers.
Hon Hai Precision is the anchor company of the technology group.
Huang, who typically keeps a low profile, reversed her usual stance as she tried to show how hard the company was working to improve conditions for its workers in an attempt to prevent any further deaths.
However, her public appearance and comments also indicated that she was not only a “key figure in managing Hon Hai’s NT$2 trillion [US$62.5 billion] assets” as Gou has said publicly several times, but also one of Gou’s troubleshooters.
As the aunt of Gou’s first wife, Lin Shu-ru (林淑如), Huang has clearly won Gou’s trust as she sought to help the company deal with the workers deaths.
It is clear Huang plays a bigger role than most chief financial executives when it comes to dealing with emergencies. In May, she was appointed by Gou to take charge of a special task force to tackle the image crisis after seven Chinese workers had fallen to their deaths.
Over the past three months, this task force has been seeking to improve working conditions in the Shenzhen factories. Measure taken have included doubling pay, cutting overtime hours, hiring hundreds of psychiatrists to provide consulting services, installing 300m² of safety nets around employee dormitories and expanding manufacturing sites to inland China.
The task force’s efforts have apparently paid off. Since late June, no further deaths have been reported at Hon Hai’s Shenzhen factories.
On Aug. 18, the company’s Chinese employees launched rallies to boost morale at the Shenzhen factory. At the time, Hon Hai said the worst was behind them and it would now look to the special task force’s recommendations and look at working them into the company’s daily operations.
Huang has also been trying to fend off negative publicity following the suicides. At a press conference last month, Huang said Hon Hai factories are not “blood-sweat-and-tears factories,” nor are they the “shame of Taiwan,” as some local professors have called the operations.
Instead, Huang said those criticisms seemed “to force Hon Hai to make an exit from Taiwan,” adding that the unfavorable sentiment has prompted the group to reassess its planned investment projects its home country.
The group originally planned to invest NT$1.9 billion in building a cloud computing data center and set up a research and development center and the group’s Asia logic center in Kaohsiung, in addition to many other projects.
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