Foxconn gets green light for $270M factory in Vietnam

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/18/foxconn-gets-green-light-for-270m-factory-in-vietnam

by 80mph • 6 years ago

91 39 6 years ago

breck2• 6 years ago

Question for people in the tech factory industry: who has the coolest factories?

I love the Intel museum at their campus, but have never been inside a Fab or even a computer assembly factory (or automotive factory, etc). Closest I've come is the place where they make all the Cape Cod Potato chips.

If you were to put together a world "most advanced factories" sightseeing tour, what would be on the list?

baybal23• 6 years ago

Most advanced does not necessarily mean most big.

I myself only saw Chinese manufacturing, and to lesser extend Vietnamese (which is mostly run by Chinese, and Japanese anyways.)

The PCB stages were fully automated for decades, and even very small shops may have zero manual population. PCB shops look more or less the same anywhere in the world.

Most interesting things come after that.

"Robots" are very easily beaten on cost by manual labour unless there is crazy commitment to volumes, long production runs, and having robotisation done very thoroughly.

Automation has economic advantage in very narrow sets of circumstances.

Though the variance in non-automated assembly lines can be giant. You can easily spend 10 times to assemble a widget with same amount of people, and equipment by getting the process management wrong.

reportingsjr2• 6 years ago

"Robots" are very easily beaten on cost by manual labour unless there is crazy commitment to volumes, long production runs, and having robotisation done very thoroughly.

Go find me a reasonably profitable machine shop that doesn't have mostly CNC machines. You won't find many. Even in places with low cost labor like China CNC machines are pretty ubiquitous outside of fairly specialty shops.

You can look on YouTube and see tons of examples of factories that have a mixture of robotic automation and human labor. The production world has changed a ton in the last ten to fifteen years!

antoniuschan992• 6 years ago

Strange parts has some cool inside look at the popular pcb manufacturing fabs such as pcbway and jlcpcb

https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s

breck2• 6 years ago

Wow, this is awesome!

Thank you!

evgen• 6 years ago

And Wisconsin continues to wait...

ska• 6 years ago

That wasn't ever a real project, it seems.

hanniabu• 6 years ago

Does anyone know if Foxconn pollutes? I imagine Vietnam doesn't have the best infrastructure so polluting is the norm there and they'd go unchecked in devastating the environment.

rmah• 6 years ago

It's not a binary question -- every factory pollutes. If only because energy, transport, etc is necessary and people generate biowaste. The question is how much and what types. The best way to clean up any environmental damage in a poor country is to help it become a rich country. At that point, the people and gov will start to prioritize it.

antoniuschan992• 6 years ago

There was a huge protest about a taiwanese factory polluting the water there a few years ago. I think they were dumping.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/01/vietnam-...

Vietnamese in the South generally have beef with Chinese though, not Taiwanese

tuankiet65• 6 years ago

One that already happened, but not Foxconn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Vietnam_marine_life_disas...

kodah• 6 years ago

There's one with their name on it in Wisconsin they could use

harikb• 6 years ago

It is not nearly complete

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-fo...

The village notified her subdivision’s residents that it would use eminent domain to seize their homes if they didn’t accept a relocation offer.

Projects started using eminent domain and destroying lives rarely succeed

neartheplain• 6 years ago

Projects started using eminent domain and destroying lives rarely succeed

Is there data on this? I’ve heard the opposite from admirers of more authoritarian governments, which “get things done” in part by moving quickly because they don’t have to deal with eminent domain proceedings.

benzible• 6 years ago

There's a great Reply All episode about this: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/wbhjwd/

mehrdada• 6 years ago

I wouldn't necessarily be as bearish on the one in Vietnam. The dynamics are very different. To wit, I have already purchased AirPods bearing Designed in California, Assembled in Vietnam markings a few months ago.

sitkack• 6 years ago

They should relocate the workers from Wisconsin to Vietnam.

athms• 6 years ago

There is also an empty lot in Pennsylvania which predates the Wisconsin site by several years.

In 2013, Foxconn promised to spend $30 million over two years building a robotics manufacturing facility in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that would have employed five hundred people. They also planned to invest $10 million into R&D at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as part of the arrangement. In return, the state, county, and city offered Foxconn tax incentives and property improvements. Seven years after the ribbon cutting ceremony, the property is still an empty lot and CMU never received the investment.

On the plus side, nobody's home was seized as they were in Wisconsin.

FerretFred• 6 years ago

Undercutting Taiwan/China labor costs eh?

imposterr• 6 years ago

That's definitely one interpretation. Another could simply be diversifying risk by opening up shop in multiple places.

wrnr• 6 years ago

Good for Vietnam, it is a nice country, hopefully they become more open to business by foreigners.

Y7EhHtj8a7• 6 years ago

One good side effect of globalization is to create opportunities to bootstrap the local economy (by whatever magnitude) and increase the standards of living for the local population and once the local economy is good enough that the wages and quality of life rise a bit, pick up and move to the next country that's cheaper and hopefully by then the local economy is good enough to support it self, at the very least better off than it started with. Hopefully in the future we would have the entire world above a certain standard of living :)

f69281c• 6 years ago

This creates an incentive for international corporations to keep a few banana republics around - nations constantly kept in shambles to ensure a fat profit margin by minimizing manufacturing costs.

It also eats away at the earning potential of the middle and lower classes in more advanced nations. If your nation's cost of living is high, finding a way to outsource your economic productivity is the goal of a titanic mountain of cash.

Because of this economic uncertainty, it ALSO makes some middle and a lot of lower class people in advanced nations latch onto the first nationalist they see.

bfrog• 6 years ago

Company should be blackballed from producing US goods. Took the money and ran in Wisconsin. Zero benefits to US citizens.

credit_guy• 6 years ago

Exactly what money did it take?

Foxconn gets green light for $270M factory in Vietnam

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