Entering Foxconn Longhua Park: How to transform the "industrial empire"?

In the past 30 years, Foxconn's factory has always given the outside world the impression of a closed kingdom, mixed with rumors, fantasy and cruel suicides. The other side of the fact is that it is a huge industrial group that has employed tens of millions of Chinese workers and accounts for nearly 4% of the country's total annual imports and exports. Its tentacles have already penetrated into everyone's daily life. In an era when everyone is seeking change, closure is destined to be unsustainable. In October of this year, we got the first opportunity to visit Foxconn Longhua Science and Technology Park and set off for Shenzhen to learn about this mysterious kingdom. Although all we can see is the tip of the iceberg, changes are taking place.

reporter | Zhang Congzhi

photography | Zhang Lei

open trial

at 9:40 am, there are still 20 minutes before the agreed interview time, the photographer and I arrived at the south of Foxconn Longhua Science Park (hereinafter referred to as "Longhua Park") door. Yesterday morning, we entered the face data at the South Ermen Renewal Center and entered the park smoothly. According to the instructions of the staff, today we can directly brush our faces and enter the park. But the turnstiles at the South Gate blocked us outside-face recognition is invalid.

No matter what our internal staff say, the security guards are selfless and will not let them go. We had to obediently walk around to the South Second Gate and come to the exchange center, where the line was crooked, twisting from the room to the road outside. There are only two staff members in the renewal center, and they sit behind the counter, not in a hurry. The line of people cast anxious glances at them. Among the crowd were new production line workers, some who opened small shops in the park, some foreign executives who came to set up jobs, including visitors like us.

The hour hand slipped past 10 o'clock and we were late. After the face data was submitted, the system still did not respond. We continued to wait. When we finally entered the park, it was already 10:30 in the morning. At the door, we spent a full 50 minutes-China's most difficult factory to enter, it really deserves its reputation. Since

was officially put into use on June 6, 1996, Shenzhen Longhua Park has become Foxconn's "pilgrimage site" for more than 20 years. Some people call it Foxconn's "Forbidden City". It is mysterious, closed, and self-contained. This witnessed Foxconn's growth from an electronic foundry to an industrial empire with factories all over the world, and the group's annual import and export volume accounted for nearly 4% of the national annual import and export volume.

Foxconn precision tools are now produced with fully automated machines, and workers only need to stare at the display screen. At the peak of

, there were nearly 400,000 employees in Longhua Park. It is said that the canteen consumes 2 tons of fish, 3 tons of pork, 15 tons of vegetables and 15 tons of rice a day. Supermarkets, restaurants, banks, Internet cafes, stadiums, swimming pools, hospitals and even fire brigades in the park are all available. The population size and complete facilities of here are comparable to that of a medium-sized county, but it only covers an area of ​​2.3 square kilometers. During the morning and evening rush hours, the road connecting the dormitory area and the factory will be blocked. Even if the number of workers has now dropped to about 200,000, the congestion of the road is still far better than that of the urban road outside the park.

On this day, we are going to interview Jiang Yimin, general manager of Fulian Intelligent Manufacturing Industry Innovation Center (one of Foxconn’s many subsidiaries). He was not surprised at the reason why we were late. It is certainly not easy to manage such a huge industrial park. During the epidemic, the management of admission permissions has become stricter. Especially after the sensational employee jumping incident that year, the string of safety management in the park became tighter. Z22z not only installed safety nets in the dormitory building and closed the access channels on the roof, but also visitors, all vehicles and goods entering and leaving the park. All must apply for filing in advance and accept inspection.

Jiang Yimin, general manager of Fulian Intelligent Manufacturing Industry Innovation Center

Longhua Park took only 4 months from construction to completion, which was a portrayal of "Shenzhen Speed" at that time. Guo Taiming later recalled: “Every piece of sand, every brick, every steel bar, every underground pipeline, and even the cover of the drainage ditch in our Longhua Park was made by ourselves.” Jiang Yimin just arrived in 2002. At the time of Longhua Park, there were only 30,000 or 40,000 people. At the end of that year, all the employees of the group were gathered on the large playground of the park to hold a lucky draw party. Since then, such a group party has never happened again.

Jiang Yimin said that in the early days, in order to grab time, Foxconn used the model of receiving orders before building factories. He heard from old employees that in 1996 theyIt was after receiving an order for a batch of computers that I started to build a factory. “Originally, it normally takes two or three years for a factory to be built and put into production, but the order is there and waiting for delivery, so the speed of building the factory is very fast.” The current Longhua Park is divided in the order of letters A to J, and there are The buildings of multiple factories and supporting living residences are practical, and their appearance looks similar.

Li Qingguo, who is now the director of intelligent tool manufacturing at Shenzhen Jingjiang Yunchuang Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Industrial Fulian, came to Foxconn several years earlier than Jiang Yimin. In 1999, after he graduated from Hubei Province No. 1 Mechanical School, Foxconn went to their school to recruit mold workers. At that time, Li Qingguo didn’t know much about this company, but he studied mold design and manufacturing, because the professional counterparts, and the other party paid 900 yuan a month, one or two hundred yuan higher than other factories, he reported Named. After three months of training in Kunshan, Jiangsu, Li Qingguo went to Shenzhen and entered Longhua Park to become a molder.

Li Qingguo, Director of Tool Intelligent Manufacturing, Shenzhen Jingjiang Yunchuang Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Industrial Fulian.

At that time, the area around the park was still a wasteland, and the nearest bus stop had to be walked for 20 to 30 minutes, but the demand for workers to travel was not strong. . At that time, Longhua belonged to outside the customs and needed a customs clearance permit to go to the city. You had to go back to the public security bureau to issue a certificate to do so. Li Qingguo never went to the city in the first year.

Compared with human customs clearance, the Shenzhen government at that time was more willing to open a convenient door for cargo clearance. It is said that during peak hours, more than 2,000 trucks pass through Chaoyangmen in Longhua Park a day. In order to facilitate Foxconn’s increasing demand for export customs clearance, the Shenzhen Municipal Government later simply built the bonded area in the Foxconn Park, and set up a special customs at Chaoyangmen. Goods passing through Chaoyangmen are equivalent to foreign trade products for customs clearance.

Jiang Yimin and Li Qingguo are both management cadres of Foxconn Industrial Internet Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Industrial Fulian"), a subsidiary of Foxconn Group, responsible for precision tool manufacturing. In 2015, Foxconn packaged its telecommunications network equipment, cloud service equipment, precision tools and industrial robots in addition to its mobile phone foundry business, and put them in the "basket" of Industrial Fortune, and put forward a high-profile industrial Internet transformation strategy. . In 2018, Fulian Industrial was listed on the A-share market, setting a record for the fastest IPO. Because

is backed by the big Foxconn tree, it has been labeled with the Internet again, and its market value once rushed to 500 billion yuan. However, after a few years, the capital market’s interest in the stories of the Industrial Internet has greatly diminished, and the performance after the listing of Industrial Fortune is not as optimistic as expected. Although its overall revenue is stable and still maintains above 400 billion yuan, the gross profit margin has changed from the listing. The former 10% dropped to about 8% in 2019, and it still failed to get rid of the dilemma of low profits. Coupled with the complex international economic situation, the market value of the Industrial Fortune Alliance has now fallen below 300 billion yuan.

Last year, Li Junqi, with a technical background, became the new helm of this huge ship. Foxconn hopes that he can open up a new situation for the industrial rich. Li Junqi has an overseas background and a local talent. He has been engaged in the research and development of precision tools for many years. He feels more like a university professor, gentle and elegant, gentle and gentle, and he has been very low-key in the past. When the news of his appointment was announced, the outside world was curious about how such a Confucian leader would lead the transformation of the Industrial Fulian.

"Our founder has always insisted on turning this company into a localized, localized, and young company." Li Junqi told me that after the listing of the Industrial Fortune Union, the nature of the company has become a public company, and the corporate governance The structure has also changed accordingly, opening to the outside world is necessary, and they are making such an attempt.

The snack street outside the Longhua Park is a frequent place for Foxconn workers after get off work.

Not long ago, Fulian Industrial held its first media open day and invited the media to visit the Longhua Park. Our trip benefited from this attempt. Open effort. However, for the media, taking pictures in Longhua Park is still prohibited. Even if it is shooting scenes of young people playing basketball on the playground in the living quarters, permission from the group level is still required. Except for the designated visit area, other factories are still a restricted area for us.

Get rid of the "crowd tactics"

The first stop we visited was the production line of a well-known brand of smart TV sticks. Zhou Guicai, the manager in charge of science and technology services at Industrial Fortune Union, served as the instructor. The production workshop is in an old factory. There are security guards at the stairway, and there are staff lockers in the stairwell.A slogan to prevent theft was posted at the destination. Before

entered the workshop, we were asked to put on shoe covers and store our mobile phones. Zhou Guicai took us into the dim workshop and began to explain each step. We are separated from the production line by a fence. Inside is a fully automated production line. The robot repeats fixed actions in small compartments and emits a low humming sound. Under the weak light of the warning light, it gives a Kind of funny loneliness.

is almost entirely operated by machines from feeding to circuit board printing, soldering, and finally packaging. The lighting is no longer necessary, so they call it the "light-off factory". This production line originally had 318 people, but now only 28 people can operate around the clock 24 hours a day.

Zhou Guicai calculated an account for me: worker wages, plus social security, welfare benefits, and related operating and management costs, in Shenzhen, an ordinary worker needs to pay 100,000 yuan a year in labor expenses. reduces nearly 300 employees and can save 30 million yuan a year, which can basically cover the cost of production line transformation. The sudden outbreak of

unmanned production workshop

this year has also highlighted the advantages of the "light-off factory". Because cities were closed and roads were closed everywhere, workers in the interior were unable to get out, and many small factories along the coast were unable to operate for months. Small factories have a low degree of automation and rely more on labor, so they have to stop production. A large number of small factories that can't stand it can only be closed down. The result of this is a surge in orders from large factories, and many orders from small factories have been transferred to large factories. "We only completed the switch of product lines this month. Before we produced the previous generation of products, the production capacity has been falling, and the production capacity per day is about 500,000 pieces. The products we are making now have to deliver 1.7 million pieces of products every day. ." Zhou Guicai said.

This is also the reason why the manufacturing industry is more enthusiastic about digitalization and automation transformation after the epidemic this year. Zhou Guicai told me, for example, the simplest warehouse management, if you rely on a warehouse keeper like the traditional way, without an information system for support, only this particular warehouse keeper knows where to put things. If he can’t come, change another one. People can't find things, and the entire warehouse is messed up.

As the world's largest foundry factory, Foxconn may have been the factory with the largest number of workers in the world. Some time ago, Li Junqi saw that the number of employees in the group had reached more than 10 million, and was surprised. Now there are more than 1 million employees in Foxconn. This shows that nearly 9 million people have gone out of Foxconn in recent years. For a factory, this is a huge number. This means that in almost every manufacturing industry, you can find people who have worked on the Foxconn assembly line. In domestic precision processing plants, many factory directors and workshop directors have Foxconn backgrounds. In the

tool factory, workers are patrolling the workshop to ensure the normal operation of the machine

. However, in recent years, the difficulty of recruiting and retaining people has also plagued Foxconn. A workshop manager at Foxconn told me that the "post-90s" and "post-00s" young people now feel bored at the factory. They don’t worry about eating or drinking. As long as they don’t work well, they don’t say hello and pat their butt. Just leave. In the early years, this was a rare phenomenon. At that time, young people from the countryside took "don’t work hard today, and find work tomorrow" as a warning.

When Li Qingguo first came to Longhua Park to do mold work, his primary goal was to earn money and pay back the borrowed tuition. He went to work in Shenzhen from the rural area of ​​Xiangyang. The opportunity was hard-won, and he always thought about how to do the job well. Molding is a highly skilled job with high wages and status among workers. The color of the uniforms worn by mold workers is different from other types of work. Only they wear green, and other workers are gray or blue, even Mold workers have an advantage in finding girlfriends in other factories in the park. Of course, all of this comes at a price.

Li Qingguo and the others were facing a lot of pressure on the production line at that time. They operated materials that they could not afford to lose without eating or drinking for months or even years. "I clearly remember that there was a piece of material that was shipped from Taiwan, worth 200,000 Taiwan dollars. At that time, a colleague of us made it NG. NG means scrap. He punched a hole that should not be punched. "Z1z

factory managers often complain that the uncertainty of workers is large, and production efficiency is affected by various aspects.For example, if you don’t have a good rest today, or if you’re in a bad mood, you’ll easily make mistakes in production and affect product quality. From the point of view of the factory, of course, it is in the interests of the factory owner to always hope that there are no errors and the production level is always at the highest level, but everyone knows that this is impossible. What is interesting about

is that in the early years, this brought "unexpected" benefits to Li Qingguo and the molders. At that time, the dormitory where the mold workers lived in Longhua Park was a "luxury" four-person room, and the other workers were a Datong shop with a dozen or even dozens of people. Li Qingguo said that the reason for providing such good accommodation is to ensure that workers have a good rest. "Only when you have a good rest can you do things efficiently and with high accuracy. If you are in a bad state of mind, you will be prone to mistakes. If you do something bad, the factory will lose more." The

automation upgrade is The factory saves a lot of labor costs

Even so, a mold worker will inevitably break several pieces of material in a year, but some parts are of low value. Just a warning and a review. But some of the losses were huge, and firing the workers did not help. "Before automation, there was no uniform operating standard on the production line. It relied on their own experience. The masters who had done a long time had a deep understanding of the equipment and products, and the quality of the products would be more stable. It’s worse, so the quality of the products coming out of the whole production line is not uniform.” All these factors of are trying to prove to the bosses that it is time that our factories should get rid of their dependence on workers.

So, in 2005, Li Qingguo was sent by the company to a factory in Denmark to learn about mold automation. After returning, he began to participate in the automation of mold production. "The most difficult thing in automation transformation is not equipment, but setting standards and rules. After your standards are set, if you want everyone to use them, you must first withstand everyone's challenges. For example, electrical discharge machining operations rely on electric current for processing. For some complex materials, just a program arrangement and combination, according to different parameters can call out more than 20,000 arrangements and combinations, which one to choose, must be constantly verified.” Although this process is not easy, the initial exploration Stumbled, but in any case, a real manufacturing revolution began then.

from mold to tool

mold corresponds to the era of personal computers and functional machines. At that time, most consumer electronics products were made of plastic materials and required injection molding. At that time, mold factories in southern China sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and it was the habit of many small and medium-sized factories to dig mold workers at Foxconn. Many people around Li Qingguo were poached and went to other factories, and their worth immediately doubled. However, since the year he came back from Denmark, the prosperous mold industry can only last two or three years at most. The consumer electronics industry is already on the eve of change, and a new era is approaching.

Around this time, Li Junqi is already planning to return from Japan. He has been doing research in Japan for 10 years since he went to the University of Tokyo to study for a PhD in 1995. These 10 years have been the time when "Made in Japan" is in full swing. Japanese companies occupy the high ground of global industrial manufacturing. Japanese universities and research institutes have mastered the most advanced equipment and the brightest minds, and are engaged in the most sophisticated research.

Li Junqi's Ph.D. subject at the University of Tokyo is intelligent manufacturing. He completed the research in 3 years and realized that he had touched the ceiling under the communication conditions at the time. Then he turned to precision manufacturing. In Japan at the time, precision manufacturing was a big hit in the industry.

Li Junqi told me that there are two paths to achieve nanometer-level precision manufacturing and processing: one is semiconductor, which is to pile up layer by layer by photolithography. This is the technology needed to make chips. Until now, it has not been able to overcome in China. ; The other is the method of machining, using precision tools to achieve nano-level surface finish. Li Junqi studied machinery, so he chose the latter. After graduating from his Ph.D., Junqi Li entered the Japan Institute of Precision Technology and began research on ultra-precision machining.

At that time, Nokia had a mobile phone with a camera that required ultra-precision processing. Its mold processing had to reach a shape accuracy of 100 nanometers, and the surface finish had to reach 5 nanometers. Finally, injection molding can become a light-transmitting optical component. At that time, Japan's best equipment was concentrated in the laboratory where Li Junqi was located. They used nano-processing equipment to make molds, and finally made lenses that met the accuracy requirements. Just like a lithography machine is needed to make a chip, Li Junqi thought at that time, in caseWhen I go back someday, it will be impossible to have technology but no equipment.

So from 2001 to 2005, he spent 4 years, not only mastered the processing technology, but also developed a complete set of nano processing equipment. The sponsor of the Japan Institute of Precision Technology is Foxconn founder Guo Taiming. At the invitation of Guo Taiming, Li Junqi returned to Shenzhen with this set of technology and equipment in 2006 and worked as a senior technical consultant in Futaihua Industrial (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group.

"At the peak of Foxconn's factory, it would produce millions of mobile phones a day. There are 100,000 machine tools, one 2 meters long, and they are arranged in a line up to 200 kilometers long." said Li Junqi, series. How to ensure high-precision, large-scale reproduction of the equipment, tools, and materials of the company was of vital importance to Foxconn at the time. After joined Foxconn in 2006, Li Junqi began to focus on research related to precision manufacturing. Processing of precision tools

Jiang Yimin was also engaged in mold business a few years before he came to Foxconn. In 2005, when Li Qingguo went to Denmark, Jiang Yimin was sent to Tokyo, Japan, and entered Li Junqi's laboratory to learn ultra-precision machining with him. One year later, the iPhone development project for Apple mobile phones was launched, and Foxconn specially formed a team to follow up. The designers of the iPhone decided to use a metal case for the phone at that time, which led the trend. The case or frame of the mobile phone we use today is carved out of a whole piece of steel or aluminum alloy with a knife. However, at that time, how to realize high-volume, low-cost high-precision metal parts processing was a big problem.

"Previously, metal precision processing technology was used in the aviation field. Because the aircraft manufacturer may deliver dozens of aircraft in a month, the batch is not large, so each piece must be processed by processing methods. If you use molds, it is not enough. Economy. The production process of aviation parts is applied to mobile phones. Mobile phones may be produced in 100 million or 200 million units a year. At the earliest, they are in the order of millions and tens of millions. Although the basic principles are the same, it must be realized. It's not easy." Jiang Yimin said.

Under the leadership of Li Junqi, Foxconn's precision tool team finally overcome the technical difficulties of precision cutting of aluminum alloy and stainless steel. Jiang Yimin has a deep understanding of the difficulty of this process.

There was an iPhone that used an aluminum alloy case. The designer designed a shiny chamfer on the case. To make this chamfer, Foxconn took a lot of effort. "At that time we made a single crystal diamond tool. This tool was originally used for ultra-precision lens processing, such as microscopes and telescopes. We wanted to use it for this chamfer, so as to meet the designer's right. Shining's requirements." Jiang Yimin said that in the initial test, more than 200 shells made of a cutter head were scrapped. If mass production is required, it is unrealistic from a cost perspective, and 100 million units will be produced a year. Mobile phone, "There are not so many diamonds in the world to make cutter heads for us". Later, they adopted various methods to re-grind and reuse the cutter head, increasing the life of a cutter head to more than 10,000 pieces, and mass production of the housing became possible. Z1z

Industrial Fulian's tool factory now has about 1,000 people, and the R&D team has about 200 people. It needs to develop 4,000 to 5,000 tools a year, and hundreds of tools are needed to produce a smart phone. Last year’s shipments were 14 million pieces, 90% of which were supplied to Foxconn’s internal factories. can't do porcelain work without diamonds. Every year, the research and development of cutting tools has already started ahead of schedule before the new products of customers are released. As soon as these knives were produced, they were immediately distributed to factories across the country, and the production line was turned around.

Cross-border and transformation

Zhou Guicai told me that in the consumer electronics industry, for terminal products, big-brand customers basically only do it for large manufacturers. Small factories first have technology and product quality difficult to meet requirements, and second, production capacity is unstable; These are intermediate products, such as controllers, connectors, etc. The production is relatively scattered, with large, medium and small foundries. Therefore, for large manufacturers like Foxconn, as long as they can keep up with the development of technology, their monopoly position relative to small and medium-sized factories is difficult to shake, but this does not mean that they can sit back and relax. Over the years, new changes and challenges have gradually emerged, and Foxconn has a sense of crisis in transition.

On the one hand, the rate of change in consumer electronicsFor example, smart phones, one-year or even six-monthly generation, every product upgrade means that the production line of the foundry must be upgraded immediately, otherwise orders will be lost; on the other hand, market demand has begun to appear With a small number of diverse features, the degree of customization is getting higher and higher. The same product may have dozens of different specifications, and a factory must be compatible with dozens of different products at the same time, which brings great difficulties to production.

"For example, if you buy a mobile phone and you want your name to be engraved on the back of the mobile phone, the production line will have to adjust the corresponding parameters. All this means that our factory has to constantly change lines, To confirm the delivery date, and constantly adjust various equipment parameters.” Zhou Guicai said, why many companies do digital transformation in , in addition to improving production efficiency and reducing dependence on people as mentioned above, there is also To achieve flexible production, adapt to this customized demand.

Foxconn's cross-border smart agriculture, using the plant factory model to produce vegetables,

factory has a life cycle, but the previous cycle may be 10 or even 20 years, now it has become several years or even months. In this life cycle, the factory must maximize and efficiently display its value. It is not just as simple as replacing people with machines. For Foxconn, which has decades of manufacturing experience, how to settle these experiences is The more important proposition is also the path to seek transformation.

Take the tool known as "industrial teeth" as an example. Traditional tool processing uses a grinding wheel to grind tungsten steel, but during the grinding process, the grinding wheel itself is also worn and gradually becomes smaller. The tool does not meet the requirements. This process is slow and unnoticeable. The experienced engineer knows how many knives a grinding wheel grinds is no longer enough. They need to be replaced and recorded. The new one needs to be measured and then corrected.

Li Junqi told me that they later developed a complete set of intelligent tool systems. According to different tools and different cutting conditions, different algorithm models were established. The system can directly command the machine tool to automatically adjust. "This is to turn the engineers' more than ten years of experience into an algorithm model, which is deposited in the system, and the efficiency and quality of production are immediately improved." The ambition of

Industrial Fuli is to form their manufacturing experience into solutions and empower others Factories, other industries. For example, precision processing technology in the consumer electronics industry is now also "feeding back" the aviation field. One of the most important technologies in the aviation field is carbon fiber processing. Carbon fiber is harder than steel. About 50% of the material in an airplane is carbon fiber. There are 1.5 million holes to be punched in a wing.

"How are we going to solve this pain point?" Li Junqi asked and answered himself, "First we solved it from the tool, we made an integrated diamond tool, and then we solved the problem of the pistol drill, and finally added a sensor to judge it with an intelligent system Should it be faster or slower, so as to liberate people from the polluted environment.” Z1z

Similar crossovers also occur in industries such as automobiles and high-speed railways. They even promoted their knives to the coal industry in Shanxi. The shield machine used for coal mining also uses tungsten steel knives. The principle is actually the same as the knives used for mobile phones. These knives used to be imported. Li Junqi and the others have successfully developed shield machine knives and imported them. Substitute.

Foxconn's positioning of Industrial Fortune is an intelligent manufacturing integrated solution service provider, exporting Foxconn's experience and services. In Li Junqi's view, their ultimate goal is to achieve a true industrial Internet. "What is the Industrial Internet?" Li Junqi used a bottle of mineral water in his hand as an example. If the consumer Internet produces mineral water and then puts it on the Internet for sale, just like Taobao does, the problem is that if half a year If the water inside has not been sold, it will cause inventory backlog.

"What the Industrial Internet has to do is to transfer all the manufacturing process of this bottle of mineral water to the Internet. Before the mineral water is made, I know when there is a demand in the world and how much demand is, and the factory can be personalized Customization and on-demand production make the manufacturing process predictable, perceivable, and controllable. Order today and it will be shipped tomorrow.” Li Junqi believes that this is the use of industrial means to solve the fundamental contradiction of human resource allocation, despite this The road seemed long, but he was full of confidence.

(This article was published in Sanlian Life Weekly, Issue 45, 2020, click on the cover image at the end of the article to place an order)