Electronics maker Foxconn Technology Group (富士康), a key manufacturer of iPhones and iPads for Apple, has been hit by a new staff dispute, with employees saying they protested this week about pay and relocation plans.
Workers at affiliate Foxconn Premier Image Technology (China) Ltd (普立爾) in Foshan, near the booming metropolis of Guangzhou, said yesterday that there had been a large protest this week over pay.
“The entire street here was filled with workers,” said one worker, sitting astride a moped outside the factory on a leafy avenue in a dusty industrial estate.
“There were perhaps six or seven thousand,” said the worker, who declined to be identified. “We’re not satisfied.”
Other workers trickling out of the gates spoke of demands for significantly higher wage levels, as well as opposition to plans to redeploy batches of workers to inland factories.
Foxconn has struggled to repair its image following a series of apparent worker suicides at its plants in southern China. The company has pledged to improve worker conditions and has raised salaries.
Many factories operating in China have been moving away from coastal regions such as Guangdong and Fujian provinces to inland areas, where labor and land costs are cheaper.
Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Group (鴻海集團) in Taiwan, will invest US$2 billion on a new plant in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, the city government said last month.
A Hon Hai spokesman denied there was any organized industrial action, but said some workers had come together to ask for higher wages. He declined to comment on how many workers were involved.
Workers in Foshan said that management had not agreed to any demands and instead threatened to fire any striking workers.
“They put out a notice saying if we strike they’ll fire us,” another worker added.
According to one worker, the factory pays a basic wage of 1,100 yuan (US$165.80) a month, which he said is less than what Foxconn had promised to pay its workers when it raised wages recently.
Take-home pay, after overtime and deductions for social security, is about 2,000 yuan per month.
Other workers appeared nervous and would not comment when asked about the dispute.
The Foshan plant employs about 20,000 people, according to workers, far smaller than Foxconn’s big facilities in Shenzhen on the other side of the Pearl River delta, which employ several hundred thousand workers.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by