Foxconn to Come to the US

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., better known to most as Foxconn, is a company that builds components and products on behalf of other companies. The manufacturer, which was founded in 1974, boasts Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Apple, and Cisco as clients. The majority of its Foxconn factory sites are in China, but with recent developments, the next factory looks like it will be built much further away.

Foxconn is frequently in the news because of its A-list roster of tech clients, but recently the company announced it would be expanding its operations into the United States as a part of a deal with Google. It will run a Foxconn factory in Santa Clara, a suburb of San Francisco, to build Google Glass products. Google announced that its wearable computer, which is a head-mounted display, would be available to consumers in 2014. The company has tried before to make its own hardware with less than positive results, so outsourcing the building of the product to Foxconn is a smart business decision. With the Foxconn factory so close to the Google campus, engineers from both companies can easily come together to work out bugs and kinks before the products get released to the public.

Though the company does have a few subsidiaries in the United States, it has never had an actual manufacturing plant anywhere in the country before, instead favoring the cheaper labor in China, the company's home base. Recently, the working climate has changed among the younger set of Chinese workers entering the job market, making expanding into the United States and building a Foxconn factory a little more attractive. This probably won't be the last Foxconn USA factory built for a high-profile client, because Apple, who uses Foxconn to build its popular iPhones and iPads, announced plans to have more of their items built in the United States.

Foxconn USA operations are going beyond just the new Google factory, though. The company recently announced it would expand into Pennsylvania and invest $30 million over the next two years to develop medical, automobile, and environmental products in a new Harrisburg Foxconn factory. It also plans to invest $10 million in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University for robotics research and development. This will all be under the umbrella of Foxconn East America, which will be based in Harrisburg.

With a new California factory and planned expansion into Pennsylvania by tech giant Foxconn, the future of manufacturing in America looks a little bit brighter. This is good news for engineers and those in the manufacturing industries, especially if the company plans more Foxconn factory locations with Apple and other companies. The new factories will bring jobs and help perk up local economies—good news for those still smarting from the slow economic recovery.

(Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)