Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 160

established with the help of the former Soviet Union—these irms
anchored the unprecedented mass production of electronic technologies
for export to the world.
The success of Foxconn is undeniable. Its 1.4 million workers labor in
over a dozen factories in China, and the company also operates manu-
facturing plants in Brazil, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, and, especially
since it experienced bad publicity for its China operations, three low-wage
European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia). It is
no exaggeration to conclude that Foxconn plays a vital role in the global
division of information labor, and although 40 percent of its revenues
come from contracts with Apple, the company manufactures products for
nearly every major IT company (Yang 2013). Clearly, however, Foxconn's
China factories employ the most workers and attract the most attention,
both good and bad. The largest of these facilities is located in the city of
Shenzhen across from Hong Kong in the south of Guongdong province,
where over 250,000 people toil in electronics plants that make products
for almost every major IT irm in the world, including leading cloud-
computing companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco,
and HP, as well as Japan's leading tech irms. Most of these workers are
immigrants to the region who come from China's hinterland in search
of a living. The Foxconn facility in Shenzhen is part of a walled complex
that includes dormitories for most of the workers and company stores that
provide them with meals and other essentials. One key to the irm's success
in making this facility, as well as others that attract rural workers, highly
productive is the workforce's utter dependence on the company for their
livelihoods, if not for their lives. Low wages and long hours building PCs,
iPhones, iPads, servers, and many of the other ingredients that comprise
the cloud have made Foxconn a world leader.
We encountered Huawei earlier in the topic in connection with both
the World Economic Forum report on cloud computing and concerns
raised by Western governments over alleged spying by company staff
in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The company, now one of
the largest producers of telecommunications equipment in the world, is
also based in Shenzhen. Huawei employs fewer people than Foxconn,
about 150,000, almost half of whom work in research and development
in China and at sites around the world. Manufacturing has tended to be
concentrated in the Shenzhen area.