Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) has made its first financial commitment for a planned flat-panel plant in Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
Hon Hai, known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康) outside of Taiwan, on Friday deposited US$60 million to special bank accounts in Wisconsin, which Mount Pleasant Village President Dave DeGroot described as a “significant milestone that should be marked and celebrated,” the paper said.
The money is to be used by the village and Racine County to buy land for the US$10 billion state-of-the-art flat-panel plant, whose construction is to begin next month, it said.
Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) last month signed an agreement with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp (WEDC) to build the plant in the state.
Hon Hai, the world’s largest contract electronics maker, has also leased a building for assembly purposes while the factory is under construction, the paper said.
Hon Hai has drawn criticism due to announced projects that did not fully materialize, it said.
However, Friday’s deposit represents a concrete “commitment of a significant amount of money to the project,” the paper added.
The iPhone assembler is to build a 5G technology ecosystem in a complex covering 486 hectares in southeastern Wisconsin to manufacture ultra-high-definition 8K panels.
The project is expected to create about 3,000 jobs in its initial stage and boost the number of new jobs to 13,000 over the following six years.
The jobs will have an estimated average annual salary of US$53,875, the company has said.
Before last month’s agreement, Wisconsin had granted Hon Hai US$3 billion in tax incentives to draw the project to the state, the largest package of subsidies ever given to a foreign company by a US state, according to US media.
In related news, Hon Hai yesterday said it will spend a total of 740.39 million yuan (US$113.19 million) to purchase two plots of land in the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone (鄭州航空港區) in China.
The plots cover 176,888m2 and 72,305m2, and their acquisition is part of the firm’s strategy to meet its operational needs, Hon Hai said in two filings with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Zhengzhou is Hon Hai’s main manufacturing hub for making Apple Inc’s iPhones.
Additional reporting by Lauly Li
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, has decided to slow down its 3-nanometer chip production as Intel Corp, one of its major customers, plans to push back the launch of its new Meteor Lake tGPU chipsets to the end of next year, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. That means Intel has canceled almost all of the 3-nanometer capacity booked for next year, with only a small amount of wafer input remaining for engineering verification, the Taipei-based researcher said in a report. Based on Intel’s original schedule, TSMC was to start producing the new chipsets in
DATA SHOW DOWNTURN: Manufacturing in Taiwan contracted as production and demand slumped, while growth in chip exports last month eased in South Korea World chip sales growth has decelerated for six straight months in another sign that the global economy is straining under the weight of rising interest rates and mounting geopolitical risks. Semiconductor sales rose 13.3 percent in June from a year earlier, down from 18 percent in May, data from the global peak industry body showed. The slowdown is the longest since the US-China trade dispute in 2018. The three-month moving average in chip sales has correlated with the global economy’s performance in the past few decades. The latest weakness comes as concern about a worldwide recession has prompted chipmakers such as Samsung
Italy is close to clinching a deal initially worth US$5 billion with Intel Corp to build an advanced semiconductor packaging and assembly plant in the country, two sources briefed on discussions said yesterday. Intel’s investment in Italy is part of a wider plan announced by the US chipmaker earlier this year to invest US$88 billion in building capacity across Europe, which is striving to cut its reliance on Asian chip imports and ease a supply crunch that has curbed output in the region’s strategic auto sector. Asking not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, the sources said the
Malaysia is scrambling to protect its assets as the descendants of the last sultan of the remote Philippine region of Sulu look to enforce a US$15 billion arbitration award in a dispute over a colonial-era land deal. In 1878, two European colonists signed a deal with the sultan for the use of his territory in present-day Malaysia — an agreement that independent Malaysia honored until 2013, paying the monarch’s descendants about US$1,000 per year. Now, 144 years later after the original deal, Malaysia is on the hook for the second-largest arbitration award on record for stopping the payments after a bloody incursion
RSS