IPad Assembler Foxconn Says It Has More Than 1 Million Employees in China

Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest contract maker of electronics, said its Chinese workforce now exceeds 1 million employees as the company continues to hire during the holiday season.

“We’re still hiring as we speak,” Louis Woo, special assistant to the chief executive officer, said in a phone interview in Shenzhen today. “Because of the Christmas holiday, everybody is working very hard.”

Customer demand is spurring hiring, said Woo, who is responsible for supervising employee welfare at the maker of Apple Inc. iPads and Hewlett-Packard Co. computers. China’s exports rose to a record last month, helped by stronger U.S. and European demand, while retail sales grew 19 percent to 1.4 trillion yuan ($210 billion) in October from a year earlier, the Chinese government said.

Foxconn, the largest private employer in China, plans to expand its workforce to as many as 1.3 million by the end of next year, Woo said in an August interview. The Taipei-based company employed about 920,000 workers at that time.

After a spate of suicides in the first five months of this year at its Shenzhen factories, Foxconn’s management increased monthly wages for factory workers about 30 percent to 1,200 yuan and promised a second raise in October to 2000 yuan.

Woo said 85 percent of front-line assembly workers hired before March 31 qualified for the October increase. He didn’t disclose the actual number.

To contact the reporter on this story: Frederik Balfour in Hong Kong at Fbalfour@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Young-Sam Cho at ycho2@bloomberg.net

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Foxconn Says Its China Workforce Exceeds 1 Million

Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

Employees work on the assembly line at Hon Hai Group's Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China.

Employees work on the assembly line at Hon Hai Group's Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg