Foxconn Update. No Viruses Allowed.

Since I’m already in a bad mood, let me rant a bit about this whole Foxconn fiasco. I’ve talked about this before going back to 2018, with a couple of brief mentions being tossed into other posts. Basically the situation is that no one seems to know what the hell is Foxconn is up to, not even Foxconn. Anyway, I thought that with the factory supposedly to open in May, this would be a good time to revisit the whole thing.

If you want some background on the situation click that link up there and it will take you to the original item I wrote back then. Go ahead. I’ll wait. (hums ‘Singing in the Rain’ and a few other showtunes)

Ah, good, you’re back. Let’s see what’s going on now, shall we?

The basic answer to that question is that no one seems to know what the hell is going on down there at the Mount Pleasant site. They’re building a factory. Maybe. I think. But what that factory is going to produce is anyone’s guess. No one knows. Certainly not the town of Mount Pleasant itself which borrowed so much money to upgrade the infrastructure around the facility that the inhabitants of the town will probably be paying off that debt for generations to come. Channel 12 in Milwaukee tried to do a story about what was going on with the town a while back, only to have the president of Mount Pleasant literally hide behind a door to try to avoid having to answer reporter’s questions, and their reporter being thrown off the factory site by local security.

Not even Foxconn seems to know what the hell they’re actually building down there. A half dozen different stories about what the company is going to build there, if anything, have come from company spokespersons since this all started, and none of them have anything to do with what the company said it was going to do when they signed the original contracts.

The latest that I heard before the pandemic hit was that they were going to make…

Wait for it… You aren’t going to believe this.

Drum roll please….

Coffee machines for airports.

Seriously. They were going to make, they claimed, automated coffee kiosks for airports according to a story in Milwaukee Business News.

Now that story has changed as well and now the company claims it’s going to make – ventilators for hospitals?

Look, I don’t care how “nimble” a company may be, but… Come on, this is all BS. I’m sorry, but it is. What the hell, exactly, is going on in that building down there in Mount Pleasant? You can’t build a factory specifically to produce flat panel displays, and then suddenly, overnight, decide you’re going to make coffee machines in it. Or then turn around and claim that within just a few weeks you’re going to take your alleged coffee machine/LCD display/whatever factory and start cranking out hospital grade ventilators. Making changes like that would require retooling the entire factory, reprogramming robots, building or buying new equipment, retraining employees. You’re looking at months of lead time plus tens of millions of dollars to retool and, no, ain’t gonna happen.

Well, not that they have many employees to retrain. The 13,000 employees they were going to hire seems to only be about 550.

But let’s ignore all of that for a moment and take a look at the other buildings the company bought here in the state..

Since the company signed the deal it made a huge PR stunt out of buying buildings in Green Bay, Eau Claire, Racine, Milwaukee and Madison. The one in Milwaukee was to be it’s “Wisconsin headquarters” and the others were to be some kind of “innovation centers”. There were big press conferences and media events to publicize the purchases, with the company announcing grand plans for – for something. It was never made clear exactly what they were going to do with the buildings, but it was going to be really, really important.

And absolutely nothing has been done with any of the buildings. At least nothing related to Foxconn itself. It’s been a year or more since the company bought them and they are still sitting empty. The company’s “Milwaukee headquarters” is a seven story building, and it is completely empty except for a bank that leases the first floor. The Eau Claire building is completely empty, and has been since it was acquired. The Green Bay, Madison and Racine “innovation centers” are occupied only by the businesses that were leasing space in them before Foxconn bought them. No renovations, no remodeling, nothing. No signs of Foxconn doing anything, not even any sign of actual Foxconn employees anywhere at any of the sites.

So what the heck is Foxconn actually doing? What will it be doing in the future? No one knows. Not even Foxconn.