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Apple's Top Assembler Foxconn Confirms Plans for US Investment, To Create 50,000 Jobs (bloomberg.com)

Foxconn, the biggest assembler of Apple devices, is in preliminary discussions to make an investment that would expand the company's U.S. operations. From a report on Bloomberg: The disclosure came hours after an announcement by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and SoftBank Group's Masayoshi Son to invest $50 billion in the U.S. and create 50,000 jobs. The money will come from SoftBank's $100 billion technology fund, which was announced in October, a person familiar with the matter said. A document that Son held up after the meeting in Trump Tower also included the words "Foxconn," "$7 billion" and "50,000 new jobs" in addition to SoftBank's numbers. "While the scope of the potential investment has not been determined, we will announce the details of any plans following the completion of direct discussions between our leadership and the relevant U.S. officials," Foxconn said in a statement. "Those plans would be made based on mutually-agreed terms."

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  1. A new golden age by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Finally with an entrepeneur taking the reins we may be staring down a new golden age for America... withtout all the BS and fake numbers spewed by the recent federal government regimes. Unemployment at less than 5%? Puh-leeze. I guess maybe if you count crap work and part time jobs with no benefits. Trump is going to take the world by the balls and basically start squeezing and say "stop fucking us over OR ELSE. Now would you like to talk?"

  2. Softbank - Sprint & T-Mobile merger failure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I suppose this doesn't have anything to do with current regulators blocking of Spint's merger with T-Mobile. Softbank president Son owns Sprint, so perhaps he's looking for a little favor when Trump assigns new folks over at the FCC.

  3. The jobs will be mostly construction jobs. by queazocotal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    50000 workers, at $25000 is 1.2 billion per year.
    These 'factories' are not going to be using employees at $10/hr to assemble PCBs.
    I note a story earlier this year "One factory has "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots", a government official told the South China Morning Post. ".

    Most of the putative 50000 jobs are going to be construction work building the factories.
    The factories are then going to be - if not totally lights-out - reducing employees to the bare minimum.
    If you're building a new factory in the USA, and contemplating employing workers at $10/hr for 5 years (three shifts), that's $500K per station or so (probably more costing all costs of employees.

    If you have even 100 employees constantly doing a very similar job, you can easily afford to spend 5 million developing a custom robotic solution, and deploying it for another $5m ($50K/station), and come very considerably out in front.

    ($10/h*24h*365*5 = 438k. Employers taxes and obligations add to this comfortably exceeding the 500k figure for three shifts)

  4. Re:Now make it a requirement that it's US-owned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why is wanting to preserve a culture "bad" when that culture is European, but pure virtue when it's some other culture? People are getting pretty tired of the racism inherent in the "everybody but Europeans (white)" mentality so prevalent among the regressive movement of late.