Taiwan Stocks 2010

Bad news, but good buying opportunity to get into Honhai.[quote]
GUANGZHOU, China (AP) – A Chinese employee of Foxconn Technology Group fell from a building and died Tuesday, state-run media said, in the 10th such death this year at the world’s largest contract maker of electronics, such as the iPod, Dell computers and Nokia phones.

Police have yet to determine if the 19-year-old worker committed suicide, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Foxconn did not immediately provide other details about the male employee.

The death is the ninth at Foxconn’s massive plant in the southern city of Shenzhen, which employs more than 300,000 people. Two other workers have tried to kill themselves by jumping from buildings in Shenzhen but they survived. Another suicide occurred at a smaller plant in northern Hebei province in January.

Labor activists say the string of suicides back up their long-standing allegations that workers toil in terrible conditions at Foxconn. They claim shifts are long, the assembly line moves too fast and managers enforce military-style discipline on the workforce.

But Foxconn has insisted that workers are treated well and are protected by social responsibility programs that ensure their welfare. The Shenzhen factory is perennially a popular place to work, with hordes of applicants lining up for jobs during the hiring season.

On Monday, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou told reporters, “We are certainly not running a sweatshop. We are confident we’ll be able to stabilize the situation soon.”

Tuesday’s reported death came just three days after a 21-year-old man who worked in the logistics department jumped from a four-story building shortly after finishing the night shift Friday. His motivations were still not known.

The highest-profile Foxconn death happened last July when Sun Danyong, 25, jumped to his death after being interrogated over a missing iPhone prototype.[/quote]
finance.yahoo.com/news/Foxconn-w … et=&ccode=

They make IPADs among other things.

:thumbsup:
Stock price now at 126.NT
2317.TW

I was looking at a TV report on Honhai yesterday, some suspicions on how they are shuttling money through their companies, might not be very profitable.

I don’t care if it’s a good investment or not. I wouldn’t knowingly give a dollar to HonHai/Foxconn, due to their longstanding reputation for being a bunch of aggressive, litigious assholes with the worst working conditions in the industry.

[quote]Foxconn sues journalist, editor over iPod ‘sweatshop’ story
Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - 12:20 AM EDT
“A Chinese court has frozen the personal assets of a reporter and an editor at a Shanghai newspaper after Apple iPod manufacturer Foxconn sued the pair for 30 million yuan (US$3.77 million) for allegedly damaging its reputation over reports of substandard work conditions,” Zhang Liuhao reports for Shanghi Daily.

“Foxconn’s subsidiary in Shenzhen reportedly petitioned the city’s Intermediate People’s Court on July 10 to freeze the property of Wang You, a reporter for China Business News, and Weng Bao, an editor at the newspaper. The locked-up assets include apartments, a car and bank accounts,” Zhang Liuhao reports.

“The company also filed a lawsuit against the journalists, seeking 20 million yuan from Wang and 10 million yuan from Weng. The case is the biggest of its kind on the Chinese mainland in terms of the size of the compensation claim,” Zhang Liuhao reports. “Foxconn is the trade name of Taiwan-based information technology manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. It is owned by Terry Guo, one of Taiwan’s richest men… The China Business News yesterday said that it ‘stands firmly behind its journalists and will bear all possible consequences in this case.’”

“The lawsuit charges that a story written by Wang tarnished the company’s reputation,” Zhang Liuhao reports. “On June 11, just four days before Wang’s story was published, Britain’s Daily Mail ran a story alleging poor working conditions in Foxconn’s mainland factories. That story touched off an investigation by Apple. The company later said it found the supplier to be mostly in compliance, but it did find some violations of its code of conduct and was working to address the issues.”[/quote]

Go ahead, sue me: it’s not defamation if it’s true. :raspberry:


Smithers…get my bat…"

Picked up some Hon-Hai on the cheap last week.

Their dividend yield is outstanding. At a current price of 114, the yield is 14.7%. This yield is calculated based on the cash dividend plus the value of the stock dividend.(it should be noted that Taiwanese stocks drop in value when the stock goes ex-div)