Business Week quoted Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) Associate Professor Jason Dedrick on the business plan of Foxconn in a profile of Foxcann CEO Terry Gou.
Gou, described as a committed salesman with an intense work ethic, has been able to generate a yearly 30 percent growth, but has recently come under scrutiny because of a series of work place suicides. To combat the attention, Gou granted full access of its facilities to Business Week, resulting in an in-depth profile of Gou and the company.
According to Business Week, Foxconn goes beyond hiring unskilled labor to assemble the various parts of mobile devices. The 50,000 workers, with 2,000 specifically focusing on design and fabrication of molds and dies, create a versatile production environment that adapts to the constant introduction of new models in the mobile industry.
“If you want to look under the hood at Foxconn and understand why they have a high market share, it’s because of these things,” Dedrick was quoted as saying.
The quote also appears in a blog post by Intomobile.com, a web site founded in 2005 offering news and analysis about the latest mobile phones and technology catered to early adopters, mobile professionals, technology enthusiasts, and technology consumers.
Business Week, a weekly business magazine published by Bloomberg L.P., offers the example of the Nokia 1209 mobile handset; a Foxconn-related company manufactures 70 percent of the phone’s hardware components.
Jason Dedrick‘s research interests include the globalization of information technology, the economic and organizational impacts of IT, national IT policy, the offshoring of innovation and knowledge work, and Green IT. Prior to coming to the iSchool, he was senior research fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He is co-director of the Personal Computing Industry Center, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
He holds a Ph.D. in Management from the University of California, Irvine, and a Masters in Pacific International Affairs from the University of California, San Diego.