Posted on 01/30/2019 7:47:48 AM PST by Theoria
Foxconn Technology Group is reconsidering plans to make advanced liquid crystal display panels at a $10 billion Wisconsin campus, and said it intends to hire mostly engineers and researchers rather than the manufacturing workforce the project originally promised.
Announced at a White House ceremony in 2017, the 20-million square foot campus marked the largest greenfield investment by a foreign-based company in U.S. history and was praised by President Donald Trump as proof of his ability to revive American manufacturing.
Foxconn, which received controversial state and local incentives for the project, initially planned to manufacture advanced large screen displays for TVs and other consumer and professional products at the facility, which is under construction. It later said it would build smaller LCD screens instead.
Now, those plans may be scaled back or even shelved, Louis Woo, special assistant to Foxconn Chief Executive Terry Gou, told Reuters. He said the company was still evaluating options for Wisconsin, but cited the steep cost of making advanced TV screens in the United States, where labor expenses are comparatively high.
“In terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S.,” he said in an interview. “We can’t compete.”
When it comes to manufacturing advanced screens for TVs, he added: “If a certain size of display has more supply, whether from China or Japan or Taiwan, we have to change, too.”
Rather than a focus on LCD manufacturing, Foxconn wants to create a “technology hub” in Wisconsin that would largely consist of research facilities along with packaging and assembly operations, Woo said. It would also produce specialized tech products for industrial, healthcare, and professional applications, he added.
“In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory. You can’t use a factory to view our Wisconsin investment,” Woo said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Well Wisconsin voted out the governor who helped to land the deal and that would’ve protected the deal so no jobs for you Wisconsin! Back to Starbucks! Keep voting for dems idiots.
Between the unions and the EPA I was scratching my head with wonder that any Chinese company could manufacture in the USA without tripling their prices. Well, here you have the rest of the story. They’ll hire our engineers so they can actually buy our smart ideas rather than stealing them all (a win, I guess) but not going to make stuff here.
One of the reasons why we’re eventually going to end up with socialism is that these corporate types just repeatedly lie their arses off.
Sooner or later the public is going to have had enough and give the Hard Left the green light to take them to the whipping shed.
Yup. New commie governor = no deal.
Foxconn is actually a Taiwanese company. But with tensions increasing with China, the viability of an independent Taiwan is questionable.
Evers is a moron. His entire life has been in education as an administrator, so he has no knowledge of business, no understanding of politics when it comes to opposing ideologies and and has never had to deal with anyone that understands capitalism.
Actually, they won't even hire our engineers.
They will hire the H1B visa engineers that are (and have been) displacing our engineers.
As I said at the time, there is NEVER any guarantee when incentives are offered. The companies would never agree to be held to every projection they might toss out, but only that they “best efforts, subject to market conditions, blah blah”. Read any annual report for the same verbage.
Which only makes sense, no one can predict the future. It’s not the company’s fault that stupid politicians offer them free money without strings attached and they take it.
Or maybe they can learn to write code.
Massive vote fraud in Milwaukee County got Evers the governorship.
I was up until 2am that night and it was a virtual tie all evening. Then at around 2am 30,000 votes were found for Evers when Milwaukee County reported their numbers. They always go last so they know how much to cheat the numbers. Dems “ win” again.
So goodbye WI prosperity, job growth, any hope of lower taxes.
Evers still looks surprised he “won”.
He’s a very old man. Been at the public school trough for many decades.
Has done so much harm even before stealing the governorship.
Walker refused to fight the fraudulent results. He is on to other things, set for life at cushy jobs.
Vote fraud is rampant everywhere in our country.
If it’s not stopped we will never win again.
The dems are more brazen every election.
We’re not idiots. Walker lost to vote fraud in Milwaukee county.
The whole idea was based on getting Owens-Croning to build a fab near by to make ultra-large panels, but that depended on another subsidy which the legislators turned down. The whole thing began to fall apart from then on.
Foxconn missed a milestone recently which cost them some millions of subsidy dollars. From the sound of this report, the other milestones won’t be met either. That becoming the case all the fuss about Foxconn subsidies which Evers ran against will evaporate like the promised 13,500 jobs
They’ll likely end up with a 2,000 sq ft building employing 20 mainland Chinese and 10 Americans ...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.