Foxconn, the Chinese company that manufactures consumer electronics for an incredible number of clients, most famously Apple, has just announced that Terry Cheng, their CEO, will resign due to health reasons. He’s leaving on July 31st. Terry only became the CEO of Foxconn in January of this year, so it’s pretty crazy that he’s leaving after just seven months. Who is going to replace him? According to Bloomberg, Calvin Chih, who joined Foxconn in 2005, will become an interim CEO until the company’s board decides what to do.
What does this all mean for you? Nothing really. Foxconn is one of the world’s most well run companies. They deliver the battery powered gadgets we lust after on time, all the time. Sure, they use cheap labor to do it, but China is experiencing what other countries went through at the turn of the 20th century. Things may suck now with all those long hours standing in a factory, but a few decades ago those Foxconn employees were all living on farms and growing rice. Similarly, there was a point where most Americans were farmers, but then the industrial revolution happened.
Anyway, except to hear more about Foxconn as people desparetly try to find something wrong with Apple. It doesn’t matter that Foxconn also makes stuff for Nintendo, one of the most loved companies of this planet, people just like picking on the big guy.
Should companies start making electronics a little closer to home? Absolutely! But in order for that to happen some laws need to be tweaked. Building a factory in China that employs more than 200,000 people is easier than opening a McDonald’s in an American city that has less than 50,000 citizens. Then there’s the whole component industry, which builds their factories close Foxconn’s factories for obvious reasons.
Without getting too political, let’s just wish Terry a swift recovery. His salary by the way, according to that Bloomberg report, is less than $120,000. That’s incredibly modest for a man in charge of the company that’s responsible for producing billions upon billions of dollars worth of toys.