Foxconn is the largest factory company on Earth — it assembles about half the world's iPhones, and its name is on almost nothing it makes. If Midea's story is a conquest map, Foxconn's is a migration map: the world's assembly line creeping inland from Shenzhen, then offshore to India, Vietnam and Mexico, decade by decade.
Foxconn — formally Hon Hai Precision Industry, of Taiwan — was founded in 1974 by Terry Gou, and has been named the world's largest electronics-manufacturing-services company for fourteen years running. Its revenue is on the order of two hundred billion dollars. It assembles roughly half the world's iPhones, builds hardware for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nintendo and Sony, and now makes a large share of Nvidia's AI servers — yet its own name appears on almost none of it. Unlike everywhere else in this atlas, Foxconn is not a place; it is a company whose story is best told as a map of where it keeps moving.
The mainland beachhead was Longhua, in Shenzhen, opened in 1988 and grown into a "Foxconn City" of hundreds of thousands — dormitories, canteens, clinics, the lot. It was here that Foxconn learned to run whole cities of workers, and here, in 2010, that a wave of worker suicides forced its labour conditions onto front pages around the world. Shenzhen became the template that every later site would copy.
As coastal wages climbed around 2010, Foxconn pushed assembly inland — to Zhengzhou (iPhone City, some 350,000 workers at peak), Chengdu (iPads), then Chongqing, Wuhan and Taiyuan — chasing cheaper land, provincial subsidies, and migrant labour closer to its workers' home provinces. On the map the centre of gravity of iPhone assembly visibly creeps west, away from the expensive coast.
Then it began to leave China altogether. From 2018, India — Chennai in Tamil Nadu, then Karnataka and a planned "fourth city" near Hyderabad, with Apple aiming for roughly a quarter of iPhones made there; Vietnam for AirPods, MacBooks and iPads; Mexico for devices bound for the United States; Brazil at Manaus. The drivers were rising China costs, US–China trade tensions, and Apple's push to de-risk — sharpened hard by the 2022 Zhengzhou lockdown and the exodus of workers on foot.
Now the floor is moving in a second sense. Foxconn is betting its future on AI servers — it builds much of Nvidia's latest hardware, its server revenue leapt about 150% in 2024, and the chairman says it could overtake the iPhone within a couple of years; the new factories going up in Mexico are largely for that. It is also chasing electric vehicles, aiming to build cars on contract the way it builds phones. Not every bet lands: a $10bn display plant promised to Wisconsin shrank to almost nothing, and a $19.5bn chip venture in India collapsed in 2023. Founder Terry Gou stepped down in 2019 — later running for Taiwan's presidency — and Young Liu now chairs. Set against the atlas, Foxconn is the moving floor itself: the single clearest illustration of how, and why, the world's assembly line keeps migrating.