Bloomberg Businessweek takes an in-depth look at Terry Gou, the CEO/Founder of Foxconn, which manufactures itmes for IBM, Sony, Nokia, Apple, and a host of other big players in the global market. The story of both Gou's rise and Foxconn's current factory logistics are fascinating; Gou started off making channel-changing knobs for black-and-white televisions, transitioned into joystick connectors for Atari, and currently produces the iPhone 4. As for those logistics, some of his factories are so large that they have their own chicken coops to produce the eggs that go into the worker's meals.
Foxconn is perhaps best known in the press for their widely publicized factory suicides, and while suicide is a terrible tragedy, the way the Foxconn situation has been portrayed in the media is a spectacular piece of B.S.; out of nearly one million employees, Foxconn has had 11 suicides. According to the World Health Organization, the typical rate of suicides in China, per million people, is roughly 140. (Even in relatively happy-go-lucky America the rate is 110 per million, ten times that of a Foxconn factory.)
Back to the manufacturing: Foxconn currently employs 50,000 toolmakers with more than 2,000 of them dedicated to the design and manufacture of molds and dies alone! But this by far is the most fascinating passage we came across in the article:
When Apple's iPhone 4 was nearing production, Foxconn and Apple discovered that the metal frame was so specialized that it could be made only by an expensive, low-volume machine usually reserved for prototypes. Apple's designers wouldn't budge on their specs, so Gou ordered more than 1,000 of the $20,000 machines from Tokyo-based Fanuc. Most companies have just one.... The Longhua plant now produces 137,000 iPhones a day, or about 90 a minute.
Read the full--and lengthy--article here.
