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Foxconn gets green light for $270M factory in Vietnam
- breck 6y agoQuestion 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?
- baybal2 6y agoMost 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.
- reportingsjr 6y 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!
- baybal2 6y agoFor metal fabrication, yes. CNC mills do make quite a lot of commercial sense for even low volume fabrications. But we here talk about electronics manufacturing, not metalworking.
- reportingsjr 6y agoI mean, even in electronics manufacturing the level of automation and robotics has drastically increased. Pick and place machines for the low end are cheap and ubiquitous these days. Go look up videos of battery factories and look at the level of robotics they have involved. It's incredible!
- baybal2 6y agoAutomatic board population has been the case for decades, yet electronics factories are for larger part non-automated past that. Batteries are too a very easy to understand case for automation. You have to make a single widget without alterations by billions for year on end — exactly the case for maximum automation.
- tape_measure 6y agoOn HN, we are supposed to respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment. CNC machines add capabilities that are not possible by hand. In these shops, you might see deburring done as an extension of the machine cycle where labor cost is high, but by hand where it is low. GP is right that automation is a huge commitment in design and manufacture. If there are any finicky parts, it's likely that humans will have to do or correct the robot's job, and now you have an idle robot and an engaged human.
- axaxs 6y agoThat's a little unfair. CNC are a type of machine that do something every machine shop would need to do. Manufacturing and assembly typically require very specific automation that would be useless to anything else...hence why it only makes sense with volume.
- antoniuschan99 6y agoStrange parts has some cool inside look at the popular pcb manufacturing fabs such as pcbway and jlcpcb https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s
- breck 6y agoWow, this is awesome! Thank you!
- evgen 6y agoAnd Wisconsin continues to wait...
- ska 6y agoThat wasn't ever a real project, it seems.
- hanniabu 6y agoDoes 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 6y agoIt'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.
- ryder9 6y agoyou should be an oil company pr rep
- antoniuschan99 6y agoThere 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-blames-toxic-waste-water-fom-steel-plant-for-mass-fish-deaths https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/01/vietnam-... Vietnamese in the South generally have beef with Chinese though, not Taiwanese
- tuankiet65 6y agoOne that already happened, but not Foxconn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Vietnam_marine_life_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Vietnam_marine_life_disas...
- thefounder 6y agoAnother communist country pumped up by U.S corporations. This time will be different, right?
- BoysenberryPi 6y agoIgnoring everything else wrong with this comment, you should know Foxconn is a Taiwanese company.
- thefounder 6y agoI guess that Apple and the the rest of the pack had no say in that. Maybe they will find out about Foxconn's plans from this HN post. Ignoring everything ignorant with your comment you should know that Foxconn uses that factory to manufacture computer devices for U.S corporations just like they've been doing in China for decades.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- oytis 6y agoThe largest Foxconn factory is in China, so I can see nothing wrong with this comment at all.
- protomyth 6y agoWell, they have moved to a mixed-economy and are still moving. There was a documentary several years back that had a VC General who was being interviewed. He was walking down a street talking about his grandchildren's interests and walking by all those American company's logos. He was not pleased.
- sudosysgen 6y agoIt's important to note that Vietnam, much like China, only promises the mixed economy temporarily, and officially at least claim that they will move away from it once the country is sufficiently developped.
- kodah 6y agoThere's one with their name on it in Wisconsin they could use
- trianglem 6y agoThat’s what you get when you mix sycophants with a snake oil salesman like trump
- sschueller 6y agoOr Elon Musk. Where is that FSD?
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoSame as every year: just around the corner.
- harikb 6y agoIt is not nearly complete https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-foxconn-factory-residents-displaced 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 6y 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.
- Proven 6y agoThat's what the NYT and admirers of central planning want us to believe.
- wtfiswiththis 6y ago>Art of the deal -Wisconsin Republicans seeking to subsidize corporations who will never love them back
- FerretFred 6y agoUndercutting Taiwan/China labor costs eh?
- imposterr 6y agoThat's definitely one interpretation. Another could simply be diversifying risk by opening up shop in multiple places.
- wrnr 6y agoGood for Vietnam, it is a nice country, hopefully they become more open to business by foreigners.
- Y7EhHtj8a7 6y agoOne 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 6y agoThis 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 6y agoCompany should be blackballed from producing US goods. Took the money and ran in Wisconsin. Zero benefits to US citizens.
- credit_guy 6y agoExactly what money did it take?
- icefrakker 6y agoVietnam is nothing more than a Chinese colony at this point.