The mega factory that never was
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Foxconn is causing a political headache for President Trump, as the Taiwanese manufacturer fails to deliver on a promise to build a 13,000-employee factory in Wisconsin.
The LCD screen plant - which was intended to hire 13,000 local blue collar workers - was heralded by the US president as a win in his struggle to return manufacturing jobs to America. But while the Wisconsin authorities have spent millions of dollars preparing the ground, Foxconn itself has obfuscated.
Ed Butler investigates what went wrong, and what it says more broadly about President's Trump's ambition to revitalise the US manufacturing sector. The programme includes journalist Josh Dzieza of The Verge, Harvard Business School professor Willy Shih, and chief economist Megan Greene of Manulife Asset Management.
(Foxconn CEO Terry Gou (L) at the groundbreaking for the Foxconn computer screen plant in Mt Pleasant, Wisconsin, in June 2018; Credit: Andy Manis/Getty Images)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Okay, we just lost the platform gang. |
| 0:02.0 | I don't know what happened here. |
| 0:04.0 | That was a very hair-raising experience. |
| 0:06.0 | We had everything in a world drop out. |
| 0:08.0 | I had clues about what was going on. |
| 0:10.0 | The one clue I didn't have early was that we'd been struck with lightning. |
| 0:14.0 | 13 minutes to the moon from the BBC World Service coming soon. |
| 0:20.0 | Hello there. from the BBC World Service coming soon. |
| 0:28.4 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:33.1 | Today, the curious tale of the manufacturing plant that never was, |
| 0:37.5 | a multi-billion dollar investment that was meant to turn a U.S. state around. |
| 0:43.6 | There's sort of a recognition that the 13,000 jobs, 10 billion investment number was far-fetched. |
| 0:47.7 | It didn't make a ton of sense in the beginning and make somewhat less sense now. |
| 0:53.2 | Yeah, a promise of Asian investment to create jobs in Trump's America and why it didn't happen. |
| 0:55.7 | They announced this big ambitious project, |
| 0:57.8 | but they didn't really think through the details. |
| 1:00.8 | What's really evident when you look at all the construction and infrastructure they're putting in |
| 1:02.6 | is the depth of the misunderstanding between the two sides. |
| 1:07.7 | All to come, in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:12.5 | When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he made big promises about making America great again. |
| 1:18.9 | A big part of that would be restoring jobs, he said. Jobs that had been shipped overseas, |
| 1:24.1 | he reckoned in part thanks to the uncompetitive trade deal signed by his predecessors in the White House with countries like China and Mexico. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.