A large explosion at Apple partner Foxconn's Chengdu manufacturing plant in southwestern China killed two people and injured another 16 late Friday, according to Chinese media reports.

Fire fighters had brought the situation under control, The Wall Street Journal reported Foxconn as saying.

The cause of the explosion, which reportedly ripped through the facility's "polishing plant" at around 7 p.m. local time, was not known. Foxconn said it was cooperating with a local police investigation. The Chengdu Municipal government confirmed two fatalities and 16 injured, including three seriously, according to The Journal.

The government "appeared to rule out foul play," according to the newspaper.

A first-person account (video below) published by MIC Gadget described a chaotic scene following the blast, with dozens of emergency vehicles arriving at the facility. According to MIC Gadget's Herman Lai, the explosion occurred in the plant's A5 building, which reportedly houses the production line for Apple's iPad 2.

Foxconn, a subsidiary of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry, assembles iPads, iPhones and iPods for Apple, its most prominent customer. The contract manufacturer also makes Amazon's Kindle ereaders and counts Acer, Asus, Intel, Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia, Sony and Vizio among its clients.

Incidents at Foxconn's manufacturing plants have been a source of controversy in recent years for Hon Hai Precision Industry and its high-profile customers. A string of worker suicides put the spotlight on working conditions and pay rates at Foxconn's Shenzen plant, which houses some 420,000 employees inside the factory complex.

Foxconn announced a series of pay raises last June in the wake of the suicides, including a 30-percent, across-the-board pay hike and a 66-percent performance-based raise for employees who get good marks following a three-month evaluation.

But last month there was more scandalous news involving Foxconn when it was revealed that three employees had been charged by Chinese authorities with leaking iPad 2 designs to third-party accessory suppliers. [/p]

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Do you think it was an accident?

 

hmmm i cant tell but it might be foul play but by whom i wish i knew... thats what you get for cheap labor i guess

 

For Lord's sake, stop underlining the fact that Foxconn and Apple are buisness partners! You could just as well write that Foxconn and Nintendo are buisness partners, but you won't - that'd make Nintendo look bad, wouldn't it? Instead, you just write that they're their "clients". So much better, has a nice ring to it. I can understand how some people want to make Apple look bad, but Foxconn is an *independent* company, the fact it has buisness connections with Apple is irrelevant.

 

Pretty much irrelevant to the article. The article is talking about an accidental explosion, and what does this have to do with it exactly?

Anyways, sad to see the lives of 2 people taken away from an accident.

Also, how does a company even become like that? Like how does it get into the manufacturing for everything business? I always wondered that.

 

I don't get it. What happened with Rockstar and Sony?

 

This

 

Hippie post is Hippie.

Apple, Nintendo, Sony or any other Foxconn client has 0 responsibility over Foxconn operations. Whether they conduct buisness with them or not is a matter of a given CEO's conscience. You can bash Foxconn for what's going on in their factories, but you can't bash anyone for having a buisness partnership with one of the best hardware manufacturers on this planet.

 

When you say "executed" regarding a factory based in China, a rifle shoot-out comes to mind.

"Fired" would be a better word, but that still has gunfire connotations. XD

 

Only two people were executed in the case, (19 others sentenced various flavours of jail time) and only because it posed a national threat. The contamination killed 6 babies and made 300,000 ill. This accident is nowhere near that scale.

So yes, more people were "fired" rather than "executed". I grasped the point crudely.