The giant Taiwanese original design manufacturer notebook makers like Quanta, Compal, Wistron, and Inventec grew to monopolize global production by building a component supply chain that snaked all over East Asia and by utilizing cheap Chinese labor to integrate and assemble the finished products. Yet this contracting model is currently undergoing a sea change as a result of the 2009 entry into the notebook sector of another Taiwanese heavyweight called Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known to the world as Foxconn. Foxconn's rise to industrial prominence threatens to revolutionize manufacture in the way that Walmart changed the retail industry. According to what passes for humor among its executives: “"In 20 years, there will be only two companies; everything will be made by Foxconn and sold by Walmart."26 Until recently, the company was itself a supplier of the Taiwanese notebook kingpins. Because its profit margin from making components was much larger than the margins it enjoyed from computer assembly, Foxconn was able to take them on by integrating all the parts manufacture and loweringits own margin on the final assembly work. Now that it is the largest private employer in China, with more than one million workers, Foxconn has the market power to force these former customers to adopt its vertical production methods by merging with its other component suppliers. Moreover, as part of the megafirm's bid to become an original design manufacturer, it is developing its own design capacity, aimed ultimately at taking on the top brands that it currently supplies: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Acer, and Sony.
Foxconn is the same company that has earned a toxic reputation for the militaristic labor discipline in its gargantuan factories. In 2010, a string of worker suicides focused international scrutiny on its Longhua factory campus in Shenzhen, which houses and employs an army of 400,000, mostly migrant, youth from China's hinterland. The deaths—eighteen in all, and dozens of others narrowly averted—were widely interpreted as an existential response to the brutality of factory labor conditions, heightened by an oppressive speed-up brought on by the sharp market demand for Apple's iPad. After the twelfth jump from the dormitory windows, a worker blog carried this poignant post: "Perhaps for the Foxconn employees and employees like us . . . the use of death is simply to testify that we were ever alive at all, and that while we lived, we had only despair."
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The Shifting Sites of Labor Markets