When 21-year-old Wang Laichun walked through the gates of a connector factory owned by Taiwan’s Foxconn in 1988, she was just another migrant worker. Little did she — or her employer — know that 32 years later, she would turn into a serious challenger for Foxconn, the company which has dominated the production of tech gadgets for decades.
In July, Ms Wang’s company Luxshare said it would buy two China-based subsidiaries of Foxconn rival Wistron, including one iPhone plant, in a Rmb3.3bn ($474m) deal that puts assembly of the iPhone, the centrepiece of global technology manufacturing, in the hands of a Chinese company for the first time.
As the US is in an escalating stand-off with China and seeks to cut Chinese companies out of the global technology industry, it could also mark the kick-off for partitioning the iPhone supply chain.