Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. is a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturing company. It is the world's largest electronics contractor manufacturer, and the third-largest information technology company by revenue (Foxconn, 2014).
Foxconn Technology Group is a high-tech enterprise which was set up in mainland China by Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. Foxconn, the largest private employer in China, is a contract manufacturer who deals with electronics and information technology companies in North America, Europe, and Japan (Foxconn, 2014).
Many people know this company because it is Apple’s foundry in China. On the back of every Apple product are the words “designed by Apple in California, assembled in China”. The apple products sold worldwide were produced by this company. However, Foxconn is famous not just because it is Apple’s foundry, but because the Foxconn suicides happened in 2010 and made the company become a center of controversy. People started to ask what was the cause of so many employee suicides within such a short time, and what role Foxconn played in these suicides.
The first suicide occurred on January 23, 2010, when a 19-year-old male employee jumped from the 13th floor of the dormitory and died instantly. This incident did not cause everyone's awareness, and they treated it as a separate incident. But then in March 2010, there were three consecutive suicides, which caused the media attention. Local media reported a lot on these successive events, trying to find an intrinsic link behind those suicides.
After the suicides occurred, the management team responded quickly. They paid the compensation to the families of the suicide employees, and released the results of the investigation of the suicides. They declared that the suicides were independent events and none of the suicides were relevant to Foxconn’s working