Business tycoon Terry Gou (郭台銘) has resigned from his position as a member of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co’s (鴻海精密) board of directors, the company announced on Saturday.
Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) globally, said in a statement that Gou resigned from his post for “personal reasons.”
Since founding the company 49 years ago, Gou led it to become one of the world’s most prestigious tech conglomerates, Hon Hai said, adding that the company owes its founder a debt of gratitude for his contributions.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
As its nine-member board already has five independent directors, the resignation of Gou would not require an immediate by-election to swear in a new member, the company added.
On Monday last week, Gou told a news conference that he would run for president next year’s election on an independent ticket.
Asked what he would do as a potential national leader if China exerted pressure on him using his position as a major shareholder in Hon Hai, Gou said that if sacrificing his personal wealth could prevent the Chinese Communist Party from attacking Taiwan, he would be willing to bear such a burden.
Gou now has to collect about 290,000 signatures, or a number equivalent to at least 1.5 percent of the electorate in the previous presidential election, within 45 days of his formal application to run as an independent candidate.
Should his presidential bid prove successful, Gou would face off against New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Vice President William Lai (賴清德), who chairs the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) in the presidential election on Jan. 13 next year.
Separately, Hon Hai on Friday said that about 1,000 people were employed at its Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin facility, after the Washington Post reported that the site was “largely empty.”
The iPhone assembler said that the complex in Wisconsin’s Racine County was “not idle,” and was producing photovoltaic inverters and servers.
Hon Hai said that a glass dome at the center of the Mount Pleasant campus — which locals interviewed by the Washington Post described as showing “few signs of life” — was being used as a high-performance computing and Internet communications control center.
In response to a Yahoo Finance report on Tuesday stating that Hon Hai had put two buildings up for sale “after years of neglected promises to bring thousands of jobs to Eau Claire and Green Bay” in Wisconsin, the company said that the properties were not relevant to production in Mount Pleasant.
Hon Hai said the property sale plan had the support of the government in Wisconsin, and that it was unlikely to affect the Mount Pleasant campus’ production and operations.
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