Apple Inc, whose supplier Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) was hit by a series of employee suicides last year, said a quick response by the Taiwanese assembler helped prevent further deaths.
Apple commissioned a review by a team of suicide-prevention experts after the worker deaths, and in August presented its findings to senior executives from both companies, including Foxconn founder and chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘), according to Apple’s annual Supplier Responsibility report.
“The team commended Foxconn for taking quick action,” Apple wrote. “Foxconn had worked openly with many outside experts and government officials in reacting to the crisis. Most important, the investigation found that Foxconn’s response had definitely saved lives.”
Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs on June 2 denied Foxconn was a sweatshop, saying his company was “all over” the supplier to deal with the deaths.
The US firm’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook, visited Foxconn’s Shenzhen, China, facility in June last year as part of an effort to stop worker suicides, the company said in the report.
Cook and his group met with Gou to discuss measures Foxconn was putting in place to prevent more deaths, Apple said in the report on Monday.
Most workers who took their own lives did so by leaping from company-owned high-rise dormitories.
Cook’s team, which included suicide-prevention specialists, made recommendations that Foxconn followed, including hiring psychological counselors, opening a 24-hour care center and installing nets in factories, Apple said.
Cook is now handling day-to-day operations at Apple, maker of the iPhone and Macintosh personal computers, while Jobs is on medical leave, the company said on Jan. 17.
Foxconn has more than 1 million employees who churn out products for customers including Apple, Dell Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Sony Corp.
In its report, Apple said its team interviewed workers and their managers in person and inspected Foxconn’s work and living areas.
Apple’s supplier responsibility report also said the company audited 127 supplier sites last year, 97 of them for the first time. More than 40 percent of the companies inspected last year said Apple was the first company to have audited them for social responsibility, the report said.
In addition to China, Apple has since 2007 conducted audits in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, the Czech Republic and the US.
Apple said it had addressed violations of its supplier code of conduct, including excessive fees charged to workers by recruitment agencies, use of underage workers and exposure to harmful chemicals.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS