Contract Manufacturing | 土城, 1974 — A Television Knob, and the Choice to Buy Moulds Instead of Land

The company that now assembles a large share of the world's electronics started out making the plastic knob you turned to change channels on a black-and-white television. 鴻海塑膠企業有限公司 was registered in Taipei County in 1974 with capital of NT$300,000. 郭台銘 put up NT$100,000 of that, borrowed from his mother, 初永真, who had raised it through a 標會 — a rotating savings club. Within about a year the business was wholly his. The NT$100,000 figure gets repeated as the company's founding capital. It was one man's share of it, and the difference is worth keeping straight. A knob is a commodity. The 模具 that makes it is not. Mould quality decides whether a moulded part is any good, and in 1977, holding his first real accumulation of cash, 郭台銘 could buy land, stockpile resin ahead of price rises, or import Japanese equipment and build his own mould shop. He built the mould shop. That is why a knob company could move into personal-computer connectors in 1981, and then cases, and then power supplies, and then whole machines. Each step was a tooling problem rather than an invention. The name changed to 鴻海精密工業股份有限公司 in 1982. The Foxconn brand and the first American subsidiary followed in 1985. Hon Hai's registered office is at 中山路66號 in 土城, New Taipei, and the group runs several plants across the district. The building photographed here is the 頂埔廠 at 中央路四段53號 — grey panel and glass, hills immediately behind, the company name in Chinese and English on the gatehouse and the number 53 on the gate. It stands in a technology park created on the site of the army's former logistics school at 頂埔, released from military to industrial use in the 2000s. 正崴 and 大霸 put up towers on the same ground. The plant is under two hundred metres from 頂埔 station, the western end of the Taipei Metro's Bannan line, which makes it one of the few sites in this collection you can reach without a car. The 1974 workshop is not here. No standard account of the company gives its address, and it does not appear to be on the public record at all. Photo: Solomon203, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Padai, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons