Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd (鴻海精密) yesterday said it plans to expand a recruitment program by hiring as many as 3,000 workers to support the development of new devices based on Mozilla’s Firefox operating system.
The scale of hiring is bigger than the company’s announcement on June 4, when it said it would hire between 500 and 1,000 engineers by the end of this year for its software center in Greater Kaohsiung to develop Firefox OS applications.
The center currently has 300 employees.
“Hon Hai will do its best to develop the Kaohsiung software center as the company’s software powerhouse,” the firm said in a statement. “There will be no budget limit for fostering software talent.”
Hon Hai, which is a major assembler of Apple Inc’s iPhones and iPads, is scheduled to participate in a job fair tomorrow organized by the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
The company plans to develop more than five devices running on Firefox OS, including smartphones and tablets, by the end of the year, which the company said is part of its efforts to provide customers with new products powered by alternative, open-source software.
The operating system will allow HTML5 apps to communicate directly with the hardware and it is being developed by Mozilla as an open-source mobile operating system.
Hon Hai has said that it hopes the platform would become another option for clients aside from Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.
However, UBS Securities analyst Arthur Hsieh (謝宗文) said in a note on Wednesday that it would take time for Hon Hai and Mozilla to make Firefox devices attractive.
Hon Hai shares fell 1.81 percent to NT$70.7 yesterday.
Additional reporting by AFP
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