A shareholders meeting of the Hon Hai Group, Foxconn's parent company, reportedly saw Chairman Terry Gou saying that production would be withdrawn from mainland China and shifted to Taiwan, Vietnam, and India, a move that would render close to a million workers unemployed. Foxconn’s facility in Shenzhen, which makes Apple’s products, is also targeted for the change.

According to The Register, this news comes by way of the Chinese-language news site ON.CC, although the report has yet to be independently verified. As noted above, the bombshell is said to have been dropped at a shareholders meeting where Hon Hai Group CEO Terry Gou said that production would be ceased in mainland China, and moved to Taiwan, Vietnam, and India. According to the report, there are currently 800,000 Foxconn workers on the mainland. The move, if confirmed, would leave these people out of work.

Foxconn has received a lot of bad press in relation to a series of suicides at its Shenzhen, China factory. The company first addressed the suicide wave by installing safety nets, then raised wages, then raised wages again, while constantly denying that pay raises had anything to do with the tragic events. The suicides may also be one of the reasons for this last initiative to spread production on a wider area on the globe, although this remains pure speculation for now.

Quoted by Macworld on June 2, Michael Phillips, director of the suicide clinic at the Shanghai Mental Health Center, said he believed there was some good coming out of the attention on Foxconn – a renewed effort to build a better strategy of suicide prevention in the country. “China has yet to develop a national strategy to tackle suicide as a public-health problem,” he said. Apple itself is actively involved in the investigation of suicides at Foxconn, the company confirmed earlier this month.