FREE WHITEWATER

Foxconn: On Shaky Ground, Literally

Not long ago, Whitewater’s Community Development Authority discussed – laughably – that Foxconn’s screen production would offer a supply-chain opportunity for Whitewater. As it turns out, beyond all the other problems of Foxconn, the site probably cannot – literally – even support the production of high-quality glass components.

Bruce Murphy at Urban Milwaukee explains:

Except that these contractors aren’t building a plant, but are working on utilities, roadways and drainage systems — which could be built for any kind of plant.

Except that it won’t be till May that the company even releases the initial bid packages for the construction of the Gen6 fabrication facility, it says, and with no date specified for when these bids will be awarded.

Except that the when the LCD plant is built, according to Adam Jelen, senior vice president with Gilbane Building Co., Foxconn’s construction manager, it will be built on the many acres of flat, compressed gravel at the Mt. Pleasant site, as he told the mediaAnd you can’t build an LCD plant on such a base, as Willy Shih, Professor of Management Practice, Harvard Business School and an expert on the LCD industry, tells Urban Milwaukee.

“A compressed gravel foundation might be fine for a normal industrial building, but it’s probably not an LCD Fab, which has to have a massive steel infrastructure to support a vibration-free environment for equipment that has to do ultra-precision (manufacturing),” Shih says.

That steel support substructure is no small undertaking and could be two floors deep — just one part of what makes these LCD plants so massively expensive.

Via More Doubts About Foxconn Project @ Urban MilwaukeeSee also Foxconn: Evidence of Bad Policy Judgment @ FREE WHITEWATER.

Note: For a different assessment from Shih’s on the conditions of the Foxconn site for LCD production, see Joe’s observation in the comments section for this post.

Previously10 Key Articles About FoxconnFoxconn as Alchemy: Magic Multipliers,  Foxconn Destroys Single-Family HomesFoxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair BudgetThe Man Behind the Foxconn ProjectA Sham News Story on Foxconn, Another Pig at the TroughEven Foxconn’s Projections Show a Vulnerable (Replaceable) WorkforceFoxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All, Foxconn’s Ambition is Automation, While Appeasing the Politically Ambitious, Foxconn’s Shabby Workplace ConditionsFoxconn’s Bait & SwitchFoxconn’s (Overwhelmingly) Low-Paying JobsThe Next Guest SpeakerTrump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build Foxconn Plant, Foxconn Deal Melts Away“Later This Year,” Foxconn’s Secret Deal with UW-Madison, Foxconn’s Predatory Reliance on Eminent Domain, Foxconn: Failure & FraudFoxconn Roundup: Desperately Ill Edition Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere, Foxconn Roundup: Outside Work and Local Land, Foxconn Couldn’t Even Meet Its Low First-Year Goal, Foxconn Talks of Folding Wisconsin Manufacturing Plans, WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re StupidLost Homes and Land, All Over a Foxconn Fantasy, Laughable Spin as Industrial Policy, Foxconn: The ‘State Visit Project,’ ‘Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn,’ Foxconn: When the Going Gets Tough…, The Amazon-New York Deal, Like the Foxconn Deal, Was Bad Policy, Foxconn Roundup, Foxconn: The Roads to Nowhere, Foxconn: Evidence of Bad Policy Judgment, and Foxconn: Behind Those Headlines.

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joe
5 years ago

I’m not so sure that this is all that nefarious. The lithography involved in making TFT displays is pretty rude, compared to microprocessors. The lines are wide and the stack-up tolerances are not all that terrible. If TFTs required state-of-the-art 10nM processes, vibration would be a very big deal, but they don’t. Even though the process makes transistors that are not visible to us on our TV screens, they are really not all that small, in semiconductor process terms.

Standard building construction techniques, such as driving some piles and isolating the pad the delicate equipment sits on from the rest of the building, works pretty well. Certainly good enuf for a LCD plant.