Foxconn, which has been accused of mistreating Chinese workers following a spate of suicides at its factory in the south, plans to mainly produce Apple iPhones at a new 100-million-dollar plant in Henan province.

Construction on that plant -- owned by Futaihua Precision Electronics (Zhengzhou) Co. Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary -- will begin on August 20 and is expected to take one year, the state Xinhua news agency reported.

For the time being, about 500 workers -- many of whom have worked at the main Foxconn production hub in southern Shenzhen -- are manning an assembly line in a temporary workshop and living in dormitories nearby, the report said.

Xinhua earlier reported that Foxconn planned to invest a total of 740 million dollars in two factories in the Henan provincial capital Zhengzhou.

The facilities will not be bigger than the company's plants in Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong, where more than 400,000 workers are employed.

Foxconn spokesman Arthur Huang was not immediately available to comment on the report when contacted by AFP.

Foxconn's move away from its long-time manufacturing hub in Shenzhen comes after it hiked salaries for assembly line workers by about 70 percent after 11 employees apparently committed suicide this year, including 10 in Shenzhen.

Labour rights activists have blamed the suicides on tough working conditions at Foxconn, prompting the head of the company to hit out last month at critics and threaten to review his company's investment plans in Taiwan.

The world's biggest electronics contractor has opened plants in Hebei, Shanxi and Hubei provinces, as well as in the southwestern mega-city of Chongqing, Xinhua said.

It has invested in another two factories in the southwestern city of Chengdu, the report said.

earlier related report
Greek truckers end strike
Athens, Greece (UPI) Aug 2, 2010 - In a major victory for the government, Greek truck drivers halted a weeklong strike against the planned overhaul of the transport sector.

Greece's umbrella truckers union, the Federation of Overland Commercial Transporters, Sunday narrowly voted in favor of getting back to work after the strike had caused a nationwide fuel shortage.

"We have made our decision with a sense of responsibility and taking into account the problems the strike action has caused," union President Giorgos Tzortzatos said in a statement.

At the height of last week's strike, which began July 25, the Greek government called in the military to supply hospitals, power plants and airports across the country. Despite the nationwide response measures, tens of thousands of holiday travelers were left stranded.

The Greek government Thursday issued an emergency order calling on drivers to return behind the wheel or face criminal penalties and the revocation of their license. Some drivers over the weekend broke their strike, easing the situation together with the military.

The end of the strike is a victory for the government, which plans to open the closed-shop transport sector. Its modernization is one of the reform programs the socialist government has promised the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in exchange for a $140 billion loan package it secured in May.

Companies that want to enter the Greek transport markets have to buy expensive licenses, a process Athens wants to make cheaper and easier in a bid to reduce transport costs.

"The transport market will open, this reform is necessary for the economy and the citizens and for that reason the legislation will go forward," the government said in a statement released after the end of the strike was announced.

Yet the strike has already done severe damage to the country's tourism industry. Thousands of travelers last week canceled their trips to Greece, which has high hopes that the income from tourism will help ease the effects of the public debt crisis.

Amanda Booth, who runs a small yacht charter company on Lefkada island in the Ionian Sea, said the strike might stop tourists from choosing Greece as their summer destination of choice in the future.

"If tourists are affected by fuel shortages, they are not going to gain a good impression of Greece," she wrote in a comment on the BBC Web site. "So much for the love of foreigners -- and their money."

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