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If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to contact us at any of the email addresses on our contact page. You might also like…. They had no plans at all. This state of affairs was obscured by the fact that Foxconn did seem to be doing something. It had bought buildings, moved dirt, and hired people.
While Gou has likened good leadership to dictatorship, his empire is too vast to be governed alone. These business groups have a large degree of autonomy and are responsible for their own profitability, and are themselves made up of smaller units that also operate quasi-independently, even doing business and competing with other Foxconn entities. Much of what had looked like progress in Wisconsin had been done by a Foxconn subsidiary called Flying Eagle Wisconsin, or FEWI, which had been created to lay the groundwork for the business groups that were supposed to actually manufacture things.
At one point, people were stuck without desks at the Milwaukee headquarters because the Foxconn subsidiaries they worked for refused to pay rent to FEWI, according to one employee. Recruiters say the Foxconn subsidiary charged with LCD manufacturing was slow to hire and seemed uninterested in moving the project forward. The comment caused an uproar.
State Republicans swiftly blamed Evers for driving Foxconn out; the administration expressed surprise at the change; Trump spoke with Gou, and Foxconn immediately announced that LCD production was back on.
Foxconn was stuck in Wisconsin, and it needed to find a way to cut its losses. Employees at every level of the project were enlisted in a search for something — anything — Foxconn could do to generate revenue. As chief of FEWI, he had relatively free rein before budgets were frozen and Woo took on a greater role. But Yeung, employees say, had always been more interested in various eccentric side projects than manufacturing.
But WeWork, as WeWork itself would soon prove, is a difficult business model to make profitable, particularly with buildings that required major renovations and were located in far-flung corners of Wisconsin. Foxconn did not approve funds to remodel the buildings. Still, Yeung persisted in trying to make Blaze happen. He solicited designs and awarded bids to contractors, who then sat for months waiting for instructions. One is still waiting to be told what to do with an HVAC unit he bought more than a year ago.
The buildings remained empty, save for their original tenants — banks, an architecture firm, other small businesses — which made them, ironically, one of the only profitable ventures Foxconn had in the state. A ,square-foot building constructed in late It initially sat empty but has since been the main site of what little manufacturing has happened in Wisconsin. The most recent plan is for the sphere to be an office and event space.
The centerpiece of the project. What was first meant to be an enormous Gen In September, Foxconn received a permit to use it for storage. A ,square-foot facility built by Fii, which says it will use it to manufacture server parts and employ to people. With Blaze stalled, employees began convening to discuss literally any other idea to make money. They searched for things in Wisconsin they could export to China: cosmetics, designer handbags, ice cream, carp.
Yeung asked them to draw up a plan for building an aquaponic fish farm in Mount Pleasant, having been inspired by a company in northern Wisconsin and reasoning that Foxconn had access to cheap water the state provided for LCD manufacturing. They briefly explored doing something with esports, maybe sponsoring a gaming team that could use the empty innovation centers, according to one source.
A plan to export dairy to China got as far as a meeting with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture before collapsing.
Yeung referred a request for comment to a Foxconn media representative, who did not respond. Foxconn only ever got as far as buying the golf carts. They arrived from China disassembled, in orange, pink, and other festive colors. At one point, the company discussed outfitting them with lights and turning them into security vehicles, but the subsidiary in charge of security refused to pay FEWI for the carts, according to one employee.
As the divisions bickered, bored employees would come down from the Milwaukee headquarters to race the carts around the empty building, until the batteries finally died. As Foxconn was secretly careening from idea to idea, Wisconsin Republicans ferociously insisted that the project was on track and did their best to derail any attempted oversight from the Evers administration.
In April , Vos swiftly attacked Evers after the governor mentioned that the contract with Foxconn would have to be revised, given that the company admitted it had changed plans from a Gen Woo had proposed it to Evers the month before. Not that it mattered, because actually revising the contract would have required Foxconn to disclose its revised plans, and possibly because it had none, it refused to do so.
By spring , business owners who had tried to become Foxconn suppliers realized they had been ghosted. He declined. The problem was that the Wisconsin project never had a conventional budget: everything from printing business cards to hiring people had to be sent back to Taiwan for approval, a process that could last months and which often ended in a denial.
He left his current job — he had been planning to anyway — and waited. Two weeks came and went. He followed up and was told Foxconn was just trying to find the perfect role for him. Then he was told he would be placed on a different team, but the team leaders were in China and would be back in two weeks. Then he was told to come to Milwaukee to meet them. Then Foxconn canceled. Eventually, he found another job. I just wonder, at the end of the day, what was their endgame? What did Foxconn get out of it?
Why the elaborate statewide charade? Many Wisconsin institutions had reason to ask that question. Earlier partnerships announced with local companies like Rockwell Automation had been followed by total silence.
Employees say they quickly fizzled; Rockwell did not return a request for comment. Meanwhile, employees dispatched in search of business ideas had worked out deals and partnerships with local companies only to have Foxconn leadership not move forward. Eventually, they started running into bridges that prior Foxconn delegations had already burned. Foxconn, according to two employees, turned to one of the few remaining friendly prospects: the Trump administration.
Woo flew to DC to meet with Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, who suggested Foxconn become a vendor to the US General Services Administration GSA , the agency that procures products for the federal government, according to an employee with knowledge of the visit. Foxconn named the initiative Project Red, White, and Blue.
The solution had a neat circularity to it — a government-subsidized project meant to earn government goodwill finding salvation in selling back to the government — but like almost everything Foxconn tried, it ended in failure. Employees searched for products Foxconn already made that were eligible for the GSA, but everything was either unprofitable or already being sold by major Foxconn customers like Dell and Cisco, according to a source with knowledge of the project, which would mean Foxconn would risk undermining actually profitable business relationships to salvage the Wisconsin project.
Increasingly desperate, Foxconn cast about for companies willing to move into the industrial park. Every plan seemed to stall or get vetoed by Foxconn leadership. In May, Gou returned to Wisconsin. But employees saw that yet another pivot was afoot. They were told to gather in Mount Pleasant, and Gou introduced a new face: Jay Lee, a University of Cincinnati professor and vice chairman of Foxconn Industrial Internet Fii , a Foxconn company that makes networking equipment.
The third leader in less than a year had been dispatched to Wisconsin. Fii was ascendant in the Foxconn empire, having spun off from the main company and gone public in China in , and its focus on automation made it less subject to the higher labor cost of operating in the US.
In September, Fii announced the first manufacturing deal of the Foxconn project, a temporary contract to make coffee vending machines for a company called Briggo. But Fii also brought a cultural shift to Foxconn in Wisconsin. Two employees witnessed and others heard about an incident in which Cheng, leaving a meeting, saw the elevator open and began berating an employee for having failed to replace its carpeting, which Cheng found ugly.
The employee, an early hire and a veteran, protested that he had only been using the byzantine expense approval process Cheng himself had demanded they follow; this process, employees say, seemed designed to not pay bills, and meant the nominal purchase of new carpet squares had to be sent overseas for approval. The employee quit shortly afterward, they said. He did not respond to inquiries. Afterward, others went out and bought the carpet themselves.
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