Nice to see a taxpayer funded white elephant stumbling ahead…
For some similar midwest context…
Talk is cheap. I wouldn’t hold my breath for a tangible product.
Louis Woo
“We continue to expand our presence around the state, create jobs, and deepen our partnerships while innovating and adapting to meet changing market needs.”
Robots? Who said anything about robots?
Speaking of cons Colbert talks to several Melanias.
Get back to me when the first Wisconsin Employee (not H1B visa or Foxconn transplant) actually gets their first paycheck.
After all, they WILL need Janitors.
This was discussed at Bloomberg Business last month, and the projection is that WI taxpayers will be on the hook for the next 23 years. The number of workers seems excessive, and as was pointed out at Bloomberg, many would probably not live in WI. So they got the “con” part right… too bad and sad for Wisconsonites.
“Our commitment from day one has been to establish a winning formula for Foxconn and for while fleecing Wisconsin for everything we can and leaving the citizens with lots of nice pollution bombs while we’re at it,”
The company is doing so while it develops plans to steal Great Lakes water.
The good news is they will make cuts in education.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Foxconn Technology Group said Monday that its manufacturing facility in Wisconsin will be producing flat-screen panels by the end of 2020, with construction starting later this year.
After completion, Foxconn will become known as GM.
Well, this is version #3,752 of what Foxconn says it has in mind for its WI plant. No one should put any stock in what Foxconn says until they actually start production. Even then, it could be mostly robots and Chinese Foxconn employees brought over from HQ.
In the absolute best-case scenario, WI will not see a break-even for 25 years. They got conned.
Building LCD screens is a low margin business. They cannot compete in Wisconsin with foreign manufacturers. Besides, they’ve promised plants elsewhere that have not materialized:
Walker wanted to buy votes for his own failures, Donnie wants to buy votes for his own failures. Yada, Yada, Yada. And the beat goes on…
I grew up in Racine. Foxconn is near the interstate, far enough from Racine to dilute the population of people who might work there, across several Republican-voting exurbs. It has this in common with the Hyundai, Kia and Nissan factories in the Confederate states, and Amazon warehouses all over: ostensibly near cities but actually far enough away to defeat the whole purpose of a city.
I call bullsh*t. Even with expedited everything, going from open field to working cleanroom factory in a year is, uh, unlikely. (Albeit they don’t say they’ll be producing for sale, just that they’ll be running something through the motions.)
AP could have done better than cut and paste another press release.
2020 is still a ways away. We’ll see how it finally comes about. I doubt they will manufacture much of anything there.
Foxconn has a long history of not following through on announced plant openings. File this under “but Uncle Bobby promised me he’d get me a pony someday!”
See the goalposts moving?
Foxconn 1.0: 13,000 jobs for FACTORY WORKERS, $3 million taxpayer investment;
Foxconn 2.0: 13,000 jobs for FACTORY WORKERS, $4.5 million taxpayer investment;
Foxconn 3.0: 3,000 jobs for FACTORY WORKERS, $4.5 million taxpayer investment;
Foxconn 4.0: MAYBE 3,000 jobs for engineers & robotics wizards, $4.5 million taxpayer investment;
Foxconn 5.0: SOME jobs for engineers & robotics wizards, some Taiwanese, taxpayer investment TBD;
–> Let’s be honest. This was a Scott Walker “Hail Mary” pass in a failed attempt to get him re-elected, with the GOP in the Legislature on board 100%.
Now Wisconsin is still on the hook for this desperation, no-exit, bad-idea deal.
These guys are going to do no such thing. Expect another round of hemming and hawing but this ain’t going to happen.