Who founded Foxconn, which produces Apple's iPhone models, and when?

Foxconn is the real manufacturer of the technological tools that most of us use in our daily life and think they are produced in the West. It's headed by a businessman named Terry Gou, who owns $6 billion, who wants to be called "The General."

If you want, let's get to know Foxconn, the world's largest electronic parts manufacturer, and Terry Gou a little closer:

To use his labor force more efficiently, Gou realized that he had to meet his needs for food, health, and shelter at work. Thus, their costs would be greatly reduced and it would become almost impossible for their competitors to compete with them.

Terry Gou (born 18 October 1950) is a Taiwanese billionaire businessman who is the Founder and former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Foxconn. Foxconn is the world's largest contract manufacturer of electronics, with factories in several countries, mostly in mainland China where it employs 1.2 million people and is its largest private employer and exporter. In April 2021, Gou became the biggest shareholder in the biotech company Eirgenix.

So he did. The eggs to be used in the meals in the cafeteria were collected from the chickens raised on the campus, and the tools that the workers would use were produced by a team of 2000 people. The campus, whose entrance resembled a prison, was a monotonous city with fast food shops, ATMs, Olympic swimming pools, LED screens for service announcements, and bookstores.

In bookstores, Gou's biography books were at the forefront. In these books, Gou also included a lot of interesting principles: “Working is also a kind of fun”, “Hard environment is a good thing”, “An army of 1000 is easy to find, but a general is hard to find.”

It wasn't hard to understand that he was talking about himself in the last sentence, because everyone knew he wanted to be called "General" rather than "Boss". With an army of 920,000 men, he could probably be considered one of the most influential generals in the world. With a net worth of nearly $6 billion, according to Forbes, "The General" was Taiwan's richest and China's largest exporter. However, he avoided talking about his wealth and said:

“I don't keep an account of the money. I have an employee who counts my wealth. Every year he hands me a piece of paper and says, 'That's all your wealth'. But to me, the amount of my wealth doesn't matter. I do not care. Right now I work for my workers, not for money.”

Gou (pronounced Gvo) started the company he now heads with a $7500 loan from his mother. Gou, who established his first office in a barracks he rented in 1974, received 3 years of vocational training and completed his military service when he was 23 years old. Then he worked as a clerk in the shipping business for 2 years. While working here, he realized that Taiwan's exports were booming and thought he should get involved instead of carrying paper. With a loan from his mother, he bought several plastic molding machines and started producing channel change buttons for black and white televisions. His first client was Admiral TV from Chicago. Soon after, RCA also started producing parts for Zenith and Philips.

Gou's first leap came in 1980 when he began producing parts for Atari. When Atari sales exploded, Hon Hai was producing fasteners for the 15,000 game consoles that Atari manufactures at its factory in Taiwan daily.

However, Gou did not want to remain a company that produced simple parts and continued to expand into new areas without neglecting to patent the technologies his company developed.

Thinking of expanding to the USA in the early 80s, Gou organized an 11-month business trip to this country. Gou, who visited many companies in 32 states during this period, mostly without notice, like a door-to-door salesman, preferred to sleep in the back seat of his rental car to reduce his spending.

During his visit to IBM, Gou, who stayed at a motel near the company, left IBM after taking a firm order for fasteners after walking around for 3 days.

During the 1980s, when competition in the Taiwanese labor market was heating up and wages were rising, producers moved to Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Although China is a close country and has an unlimited supply of cheap workers, few companies dared to enter this market. Infrastructure was rather inadequate and they feared the government.

Gou did something different and opened a shop in the suburbs of Shenzhen, China, on the Hong Kong border. By 1996, Gou was now confident that China would be the place of choice for the manufacturing market. He began to build large factories in Longhua.

The western world had seen something similar to Gou's trading strategy before. That name that came out of the western world was Henry Ford. Henry Ford understood the importance of vertical integration, producing his own materials and arranging the assembly line for maximum efficiency. The company Ford dreamed of would be so large it would be enough to employ the population of an entire American state.

Ford may have had Michigan, but Gou had Shenzhen too.

In the blink of an eye, Foxconn; It had started producing mainframe parts for companies like IBM, HP, and Apple.

This rapid rise of the company had somehow escaped the attention of the Western world. Until June 2006, there was hardly any news about Foxconn in the Western media.

However, an article published in the London Daily Mail on this date caused Foxconn to turn its eyes. In the article, Foxconn's iPod factory in Longhua mentioned that 30,000 workers were employed in very difficult conditions.

There was dust all over the place. While everyone was blaming each other, Apple had to send a team to the factory to closely examine the situation of the workers. The team's report showed that the factory's working conditions were indeed harsh: workers worked more than normal hours, struggled with pay, and slept in three-story bunk beds.

After the report, Foxconn made adjustments on the issues it was criticized for.

Apple had compressed Foxconn, but; In fact, Steve Jobs was not in a position to break his relationship with Hon Hai at that time. Because the new product of Apple, which will be released a year later, iPhones have already started to be produced here.

With the crisis over, Gou set himself a new target and emerged as a competitor to the laptop companies he had previously produced parts for. In a short time, it was able to gain a considerable share in this market as well.

Perhaps the most important reason for Foxconn's rapid rise was that it took the risk of making large investments for the companies it did business with. The company sacrificed 1 billion dollars for a factory that will produce 30 million machines a year for Hewlett-Packard; When he realized that the innovative iron frame of the iPhone 4 could only be produced with a low-speed machine used in the production of prototypes, he did not hesitate to buy 1000 of these machines, of which most companies only have one.

Workers say they work at Foxconn in order to earn the money they need as soon as possible. Some want to be able to buy the dazzling technological gadgets they produce every day. Others talk about wanting to be an entrepreneur.

What is Gou doing?

How do you think this man, who seems to have devoted his life to making money, spends his days? Gou, who spends time in offices in Taipei and China, lives in the room behind his office in Longhua. He says he works 16 hours a day and eats all 3 meals at his desk.

“I never thought I was successful,” he says.

“If I am successful, I should retire. If I haven't retired, that means I still have to work hard and keep the company going.”

Gou's current plan is to spread around the world. It already has a center in Houston, USA, where 1000 workers are employed. He thinks they can establish a fully automatic factory in 5 years.

But he also admits that expanding a business in the Western world will be much more difficult than growing in China:

“It scares me that there are too many lawyers in America. I don't want to waste my time on people who sue me every day," he adds.

September 15, 2022: Foxconn to establish a chip factory in India with an investment of 19.5 billion dollars

Taiwan-based electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn will establish one of the first semiconductor chip factories in India with mining company Vedanta.

The factory, which will be established in the state of Gujarat within the scope of the 19.5 billion dollar agreement, will also provide employment for approximately 100 thousand people.

Anil Agrawal, manager of Indian mining giant Vedanta, said that they are looking for land near the state capital Ahmedabad for the factory to be built on an area of ​​1.6 square kilometers.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that a $10 billion stimulus package was prepared last year to encourage chip production in the country.

Modi has announced that large investments will be made in this sector to make the country less dependent on chip manufacturers in the USA and China. It was stated that a total investment of approximately 30 billion dollars would be made to strengthen the technology sector.

Foxconn also produces famous devices such as iPad, iPhone, PlayStation and Xbox.