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Foxconn Building Factories In Indonesia
jfruh writes "Chinese electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn is building factories in Indonesia, and upon hearing the news you might be tempted to think the company is simply moving into labor markets where it can find cheaper employees. But in fact, the Indonesian factories will specifically produce smartphones and computers for Indonesians; the country has almost as many people as the United States, but smartphone penetration there remains low."
funny - Foxconn is reported as being Taiwanese, not Chinese... hello??
Can we be sure it's not about the low wages?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
And, if contrary to popular belief, familiarity breeds a lack of contempt....
Insidious.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In China they can treat people like virtual slaves but in Indonesia they can get actual slaves (people who bought a job from a dealer and came over from say Thailand only to have their passports taken by their new bosses and all their salary taken as interest on the loan, cost of rent for their on factory dormatory etc). I think we should seriously consider whether outsourcing is worth it. Companies make small concessions to "cultural differences" in labor practices in overseas markets. Those companies make "small consessions" when they outsource to regional players, etc. Eventually you have children working in illegal mines at gun point in a forest somewhere. I really don't the latest iCrap that bad.
How can a company as big as Foxconn think that the way to improve smartphone sales in Indonesia is to start mass producing Blackberries in Indonesia? Can't the Indonesians just skip Blackberries and go straight to Android? I'd recommend iPhones, but I doubt many Indonesians, living on $4,000 a year, could afford a phone that costs about two months wages. http://www.nationmultimedia.co...
"Foxconn Building Factories In Indonesia"
Wow! Foxconn has factories dedicated to constructing buildings?!?!
I bet the assembly line is frikkin HUGE!
Now the workers don't even have to go outside to jump to their death! They can just jump off the assembly line!
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Yes good for them. But eventually, as Chinese wages increase, more work WILL be moved to Indonesia - I don't buy the bullshit that they just built the factory for the Indonesian market only. You will see them start to build phones and computes for other markets and the factory will be used as leverage to suppress wages in China. That's how it happened here in the US.
It's great that more and more of the World is advancing and it will lead us the road to an advanced planet. Wonderful.
But it's going to cause a lot of more pain in the Western World and in the US.
In general, our wages and standard of living of declined in the last couple of decades - even the educated (like software developers) are feeling the pain. And we are going to have to make adjustments.
Sure we can get a computer and cell phone relatively cheap but, medical care, college costs, food, and even energy (gasoline/oil is still creeping up even this oil boom in the States) are continuing their ever increase march upward. Industries that need the Middle Class worker are needing less and less people because of efficiencies and automation and what people they do need, they're off-shoring.
New industries need hardly any people compared to the old days. Google has only 30,000 thousand employees whereas in the old days, a company that size would have needed 300,000 or more. Now consider that all the other big companies these days are doing the same: employee wise, IBM is a shadow of its former self. And there are not enough small companies and start-ups to take up the slack.
And I'm seeing more and more displaced middle-aged workers using their retirement savings to start small businesses to create their own job and many are failing. 4 out of 5 businesses fail.
The Middle Class is disappearing and we need to start to make changes - disrupt the status quo - or we'll lose everything.
There are billions of more people in the World who in poverty and business will be able to find cheaper labor in other countries for quite a few more decades.
Solution for the US? 1950s income tax rates and strengthen the unions: try to bring back the institutions and policies we had during our boom times.
Solution for the US? 1950s income tax rates and strengthen the unions: try to bring back the institutions and policies we had during our boom times.
In today's political climate, suggesting such things without mentioning their lineage would get you called a "socialist" (by people who say that's bad even though they have no idea what it means), with a possible implication of being a communist.
By that logic, McCarthy missed the big fish. He talked about communists in the state department, but missed that the White House itself was occupied by a communist - Comrade Eisenhower. Talk about us being a bunch of communist dupes! The fellow who we considered an icon of moderation and middle class values was himself a commie.
Foxconn is Taiwanese, not Chinese. That's an essential distinction because neither the Taiwanese government nor their businessmen have any allegiance to the People's Republic of China. The fact that they've torn down a lot of barriers to travel and business is primarily due to opportunities for profit.
Taiwan still has a strong manufacturing base and like most other countries shifting manufacturing to China because it was cheaper. The fundamental driver, was cheap labor and overall lower cost of doing business. However, in many cases they retained the expertise for themselves, generally sending Taiwanese over to China to run the factories. This is in contrast to Americans who essentially outsource everything and then leave quality control and factory management in the hands of the locals.
This makes it much easier for Taiwanese to pull out and move their manufacturing elsewhere. They aren't stuck with this knowledge base in China they've invested in. Moving a factory isn't a big deal if there's a good case for it. It's relatively easy to train locals to work at your factory. However, engineers and managers with intimate knowledge of the process and all its nuances is much harder to replace.
The end result is that in the long run China is screwed. Unlike the Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese, they're still a ways away from establishing their own technological base that enables them to not be reliant on manufacturing. The Taiwanese have had a harder time establishing their own brands, but they've practically cornered the market in high end manufacturing. Their companies are less likely to suffer a conflict of interest, unlike Samsung, and the stuff they make has a high degree of quality.
like it or not, beta is here to stay...I'm pretty sure of that. Best you could do is adapt to change like a good /.'er.
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
Sure. Where do you think all the stuff you buy is built?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And it was so obvious! I mean, Eisen means iron in German, and Stahl (as in Stalin) means steel. And where did the two countries they represented meet only a few years before?
The truth is out there!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Where is the difference between a device costing 300 bucks or 400 bucks if you have 0.00 bucks because you have no job?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Maybe McCarthy was a commie too. It's a great tactic to distract attention from the big fish by going after the small fry. Damn those commies are clever.
b-e-c-a-u-s-e t-h-e-y w-a-n-t t-o s-e-l-l a-l-l t-h-e u-s-e-r d-a-t-a t-o a-d-v-e-r-t-i-s-e-r-s
i heard that taxation on electronic "luxury" goods is at an insane level in indonesia, resulting in grey imports and smuggling. building a factory in indonesia would be a simple way to get round the problem.
Of course, The booming economy of the '50s was because of higher tax rates and strong private-sector unions... It had nothing to do with the massive increases in production capacity & capabilities as a result of the recently ended war effort, right?
Ignoring unions, please explain how government taking a larger portion of everyone's income 'grows' the economy?
Here's what I suggest, let's remove every tax incentive offered to the auto industry and strengthen the auto worker unions to get them back to where they were in the '50s - that will certainly bring Detroit back from bankruptcy...
Ken
Actually the government taking more income can result in economic growth in the middle term. In Eisenhower's case he used that income to build the Interstate Highway System. Which eventually made trade cheaper and resulted in increased economic wealth for all in the US. This does not mean it is good for taxes to increase. What it does mean is that infrastructure spending is a good idea.
Since when are they Chinese ?!
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., trading as Foxconn Technology Group, is a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturing company headquartered in Tucheng, New Taipei, Taiwan. Wikipedia
Stock price: 2317 (TPE) NT$81.70 +0.30 (+0.37%)
Feb 10, 1:30 PM GMT+8 - Disclaimer
Founder: Terry Gou
Founded: 1974
Headqhttp://slashdot.org/story/14/02/10/138219/foxconn-building-factories-in-indonesia#uarters: New Taipei, Taiwan
End of Line.
Criticize the technical merits all you like, but Mozilla's partnership with Foxconn to produce inexpensive phones may turn out to be very strategic (for both parties).
Maybe you haven't noticed, but that's the opposite of what the rich people who control our legislatures are paying for.
They pulled the ladder up behind them on purpose; they don't want an egalitarian society.
Solution for the US? 1950s income tax rates and strengthen the unions: try to bring back the institutions and policies we had during our boom times.
Let's consider the other policy items that weren't around then. There was a lot less regulation, for example, no EPA or OSHA.
Social Security took a much smaller bite (3-5% instead of over 15% currently). Certain huge changes would need to be done to US health care, particularly the constraints on employer-offered health insurance and the recent individual and (as yet not implemented) employer mandates.
While education was less prevalent and subsidized, it was also far less expensive.
So let's critique your proposals. First, stronger labor unions greatly increase the cost of employing people in the US without creating any value to the employer for doing so. Higher income tax rates actually were easy to bypass, resulting in similar real tax rates similar to present.
I don't see what about this scheme will actually help make more middle class people.
And I'm seeing more and more displaced middle-aged workers using their retirement savings to start small businesses to create their own job and many are failing. 4 out of 5 businesses fail.
That's actually a pretty good success rate from what I've heard.
Indonesia is already growing rapidly, and labor there is not a lot cheaper (if at all) than China. Any cost savings from moving factories from China to Indonesia are going to be very short term. Probably a better strategy if all they are worried about is cost is to move them out of expensive South Eastern China into the provinces, as the Chinese Government is trying to encourage with all the ghost cities they are building.
If we had those - inflation adjusted obviously - income tax rates of the 50's, I wonder how the financial collapse of '08 have panned out.
The same. 50 to 1 leverage doesn't change because of income tax rates. Neither does the Fed's easy credit policy change. That's the two big factors right there.