Foxconn CEO Terry Gou and President Trump recently announced a plan to bring 3,000 jobs[1] to Wisconsin at what appears to be a flat screen manufacturing plant. The political press ate it up, alternatively excoriating the program for costing too much in tax breaks[2] and crowing a win for Wisconsin’s conservative governor, Scott Walker[3].
I wouldn’t encourage either party to hold their breath.
Gou is in the habit of promising big and rarely delivering. Four years ago business journals crowed about a plan to bring a Foxconn flat screen manufacturing plant to Pennsylvania in 2013[4]. The result? Foxconn opened an empty office in Harrisburg and nothing further has been done.
This behavior is not new. Foxconn has signed letters promising to build factories in Indonesia (2013), Vietnam (2007), and Brazil (2011). None of these were completed according to the original pie-in-the-sky spec. Reuters had this to say about the Brazil adventure:
When Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group agreed in April 2011 to make Apple products here, President Dilma Rousseff and her advisers promised that up to $12 billion in investments over six years would transform the Brazilian technology sector, putting it on the cutting edge of touch screen development. A new supply chain would be created, generating high-quality jobs and bringing down prices of the coveted gadgets.
Four years later, none of that has come true.
Foxconn has created only a small fraction of the 100,000 jobs that the government projected, and most of the work is in low-skill assembly. There is little sign that it has catalyzed Brazil’s technology sector or created much of a local supply chain.
The current Wisconsin deal involves a $10 billion investment...