this is bbc news. the latest news and headlines follow at the top of the hour, after this programme. this is the man in charge of one of the world's most powerful tech firms. young liu runs foxconn, headquartered in taiwan. its reach is global, it makes almost half of the consumer electronics products on the planet. it is best known for imacs, ipads and the ubiquitous iphone. now, the company is at a criticaljunction. the united states and china at the moment are engaged in what we see as strategic competition. in a competition when two sides are competing, there has to be only one winner. foxconn wants to do business with both and they want to be with both winners, but there

can only be one winner. in his first ever interview with international media, young liu, foxconn�*s chairman, charts the company's survival. we hope peace and stability will be something the leader of these two countries will keep those in mind. wherever you go in taiwan, everybody knows foxconn. the company dominates things here. it's benefited from decades of a stable relationship between the us and china, but it's now caught in middle of a giant tug—of—war between the two sides, and is looking for that next product to help it chart its future. how it does that is what i'll be exploring in this edition of asia's tech titans.

the changing of the guard at taiwan's national revolutionary martyr�*s momument. taiwan is an island that's always been on edge. since 1950, taiwan has been functioning as a self ruled island, but china sees it as a rebel region that must be reunited with the mainland — by force if necessary. the chinese government continues to see taiwan as a core interest, they are not going to relinquish their view that taiwan is an integral part, simply a rogue province of mainland china, and that the annexation, the unification with taiwan is notjust necessary but also destiny. what does that mean for a company like foxconn? they are always going to have to keep those political threats under consideration, and that will really

hamper the ability for foxconn to operate. which is why this new era of foxconn�*s growth is so critical for the chairman young liu. he's only been in the job since 2019, and has a huge task on his hands — how to help foxconn navigate the relationship between the us and china. hello, so nice to meet you. i met him for an exclusive conversation, the first time he has spoken to an international broadcaster and with concerns of war between us and china not far from his mind. does it keep you up at night, thinking about this, the possibility that war between, or conflict between, the us and china might be imminent, and taiwan could be caught up and companies in taiwan could be caught up in all of this?

well, i would say of course, this is always a factor i have to think about. how bad would you say the current relationship is between the us and china, from your decades of experience as a business leader? do you think this is a permanent break—up? i don't know politics that much, but in my mind, i think politics is something that may change. i don't know exactly what they are trying to fight for, but i always think they will reach a balance. so how do you as a business prepare for something like that? your operations are headquartered here, you are a vital part of the taiwan economy.

what's the business contingency plan here? diversification is one way. as a business, as a ceo, i have to think about what if the worst case happened, so we are doing something, some planning, hopefully it will not happen. but we have to be prepared. i just want to get a sense from you about the economic model in the last four decades that has helped foxconn thrive. it's been manufacturing in china and selling to mainly us customers, leveraging that sort of dynamic, and it's really worked well for companies like foxconn. yes. do you think because of the current tensions, that model is over, we are in a new world now? i don't think so.

we are doing manufacturing, we hire a lot of workers, and most countries, they want to support their workers, including china. whether we are going to have all the manufacturing in china, would that be affected, because of the tension? so far we haven't seen it. we have not seen it. maybe because of the type of business that we are in. the us has talked about de—risking from china. what does that mean for a business like yours? we do contract manufacturing for our branded customers. many of whom are in the west. right. and they probably get the push from their government about de—risking, and then they will let us know. have they done that yet? there is some, but not all.

for certain product lines, like, already moved to mexico others have moved to vietnam, but not all the product lines, it depends whether the products have national security concerns, they will be the first batch to move. national security concerns are one reason why foxconn has looked elsewhere to manufacture its products. the company chose this site in wisconsin as a way to shift manufacturing from china to the united states. it was initially billed as a $10 billion investment, creating thousands ofjobs in the us when it was first announced in 2017, but that didn't materialise. the company eventually renegotiated the contract and today says it's invested just over $1 billion there. alan young was the director

of strategic initiatives at foxconn, now a professor at the university of wisconsin madison. there are lots of things that really, when you plan big projects, you cannot anticipate everything will work out and unfold the way that you have written down on the plan. in the case of the project wisconsin, i think it came about because of the right policy put in place under the trump administration, but now you look at the past two or three years, with the biden administration, with the chips act, the inflation reduction act, there's a lot of encouragement, a lot of policy statements made by the us government to really encourage manufacturers to come back here, the company knew at some point there would be demand, clients that ask can you do this for us, can you make products because we need

to configure servers and when you do that you have a footprint in the united states, perhaps somewhere in the upper midwest, so i think the move was right, the timing may be off a little bit, but you can neverfault the company for trying hard. along with geopolitical concerns, there have been other pressures on foxconn to re—evaluate its china strategy — like this event, a mass riot at its plant in china in late 2022, social media video showing the extent of the fear and anger. workers who were worried about a covid outbreak trying to flee from the foxconn factory — their desire to escape made worse by historical reports of worker abuse at foxconn. it was the explosive moment, the pent up pressure because of the lockdown, the mismanagement, and some genuine belief they would die because of the coronavirus infection.

and workers were desperate to protect their own safety and health, so much so that they wanted to just escape the foxconn factory as quick as possible. but young liu says it was more complicated than that. i think this event was a very sad event. the reason why it happened is, as i mentioned, because of the virus mutating, becoming so contagious. too many people got infected, because the way the quarantine was done, because the company do not have enough space to quarantine. when our workers, they sensed the virus becoming so contagious, they were afraid of catching it, they wanted to leave and when they wanted to leave, we don't really have any measure to stop them —

they can leave freely. but what happened is there's no transportation for them, because the government has stringent quarantine policies. so, the scene you saw was due to the transportation not being there. but, with all due respect, what workers have told us and other media is that they face being locked in their rooms or on the campus with very little information about the infection rates, about how covid was spreading on your factory floor in china, and they were concerned that they were going to get infected and that nobody was going to help them. looking back, don't you think there were serious mistakes made there, and do you have some regret about that?

this is not really to my understanding. i think there are two groups of people. one was people who got infected, that need to be quarantined, and another group of people who were tested were clean. for people who got infected, they were quarantined in dedicated dormitories. and because under the zero covid policy, they are not allowed to leave. but that group of people, yes, ok, but that's the local government, their rule that we had to abide by. when they do the virus test, they used a 20—in—1 type of method to be efficient. that means you test 20

people and put them in one cube and test them, and if one person in the 20 people was infected, then this 20 people will be treated as infected. so this 20 people will be put in the quarantine area, maybe one or two are really infected, but the other ones, because of the test, so they may not be infected, i think you are talking about those people. so what do you think led to those riots and the protests amongst workers? it wasn't an isolated event, there were hundreds of people involved. what do you think led to that? if it's not as contagious as it was, then we would be doing fine with the zero covid quarantine policy.

then, it all started with a new virus, when it becomes so contagious and there were too many people treated as infected, and that caused the quarantine process, the quarantine method to become out of control. so i will say, if the same thing happened again, i would stop the production. if the same situation occurs again, we will stop the production. altogether? altogether. even at the risk of annoying your biggest customers, because you were making iphones at that factory? we have to find other ways to satisfy that, but in that factory, in that kind of situation, we'd better stop it. when you look back now,

do you wish you had made that decision at that time, and said ok guys, we are pulling the plug, because workers come first? i would probably do that if it happened again, yeah. part of young liu's desire for foxconn to be more transparent is what led to me getting exclusive access to him and the company. he invited us to the firm's annual general meeting, a once—a—year, in—person reckoning with shareholders. it was a chance for me to see him in action, batting criticism and complaints from shareholders who have travelled far and wide to see him, some perhaps more persistent than others. but while young liu is now in the spotlight, it was terry guo, the charismatic founder of the firm, who built it all. today, he's one of the country's richest men.

he started out in 1974 with a loan ofjust $7,500 from his mum to make channel—changing knobs on black—and—white tvs. he was extremely influential, often rubbing shoulders with world leaders, political connections that helped pave the way. foxconn�*s now the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, and counts dell, microsoft, amazon and sony as customers. on this factory floor in taipei, it's making components for servers and data centres. but it was one company in particular that led to a huge shift in its fortunes — apple. terry guo knows steve jobs for many years. if you recall that when steve jobs came back around �*97, �*98 for the second time, stevejobs desperately — desperately needed something big to grow. early 2000, you might remember, apple had this product called imac, it's a big round thing on the desk with different very colourful crt monitors —

an enclosure for apple. basically, making monitors into a very attractive product. so they go way back. stevejobs has a great vision of his product, but the problem is that many things steve jobs want to sell cannot be manufactured, so stevejobs needs terry guo to work closely and be able to manufacture stevejobs�*s dream product. that's why you have iphone. in 2007, before we heard about iphone, they made iphone already. by its own admission, foxconn likes to keep a low profile. but even if you haven't heard of the company itself, you probably would have seen one of these — the iphone. now, each iphone contains hundreds of components, and foxconn makes around 60% of them from things like the camera module to the connectors in the device and even the back of the phone. but smart phone sales are plateauing, and foxconn needs to find the next big thing, the next iphone so to speak, to drive growth forward.

enter electric vehicles. we are going to — we have three new ev. right. but we're going to show you one. 0h, fantastic. i'm looking forward... there you go. we have model c, model b and model e. 0k. let's go. how does this compare to your car? oh, the driving experience is much better. it's very powerful. this is equivalent to about 460 horsepower. it's quite different to making iphones, right? right! definitely. and this is much more complicated than the iphones. if we look at the component count wise, the typical ev will have about 10,000 parts. comparing to phones, it's about 600 parts. there's about 20 times — roughly 20 times

more components. pretty ambitious, right, to go from making consumer devices like phones to making this? yes. the reason why we think this is a great opportunity for foxconn is that, in the past, most of the cars are made with mechanical stuff. right. very, very little ee parts in the car. but with evs, there are a lot of ee components. so it feels quite familiar for you then. right. look at this — this is like a big iphone — big ipad — big ipad. yeah, yeah. so, we are very familiar with this, how to make this, and we are also very familiar with this panel. it's a pretty smooth ride. yes, it is. smooth driving also. oh, wow! that's fast! oh, my goodness! 3.8 seconds...from zero to 100.

how's my driving skills? 0h, very good. i feel very safe here. thank you, thank you. but put aside the fun and games fora bit, and making cars is a serious business. you've never made a car before. right. there's a lot of competition. right. tesla, byd, you know they're well ahead, those are the evs, and then there's the traditional carmakers. how confident are you that this is going to take off? so far, we haven't seen a big enough company who is focusing on contract design in the manufacturing services. the companies that you just mentioned, they're all branded companies, they sell their own products. but we don't. so we are going to deal with the model that we are very familiar with, which is

contract manufacturing. so the companies you just mentioned, they potentially are oui’ customers. we can do the work for them. that's why we were very, very excited and we think it's very promising for us with that kind of business model to go into this ev business. you said potentially they could be your customers. are any of them currently your customers, like tesla or byd? of course, yeah, yeah. we are already doing something for them, but i cannot name them. so is that to give us a sense that it's tesla you're having a business relationship with or...? we are doing something in mexico...for those companies. why was it so important to diversify notjust the product line, but the geography of

where you're making these evs? because from what i understand, you're not making the evs in china, which has been your traditional manufacturing base. i think regional manufacturing for the evs orfor cars is quite natural because cars are very bulky, very big and very heavy. it doesn't make sense for you to make in one place and ship this very big, heavy thing to another place, another country. so regionalised production for cars is very natural. that's why we had our factory in ohio, and we're going to have one in thailand. soon we will have one in india. so what's the ambition here when it comes to evs and the growth for foxconn in the future? i will say for our future

growth definitely is on the evs. we see the opportunity of evs so we will grab it, grab these opportunities. we think by 2025 we have to reach at least about 5% for us to become significant enough as a player in that industry. so our goal is to reach about 5% of that market. foxconn�*s balancing act between west and east is reminiscent of a scene that plays out across parks in taipei every morning — the ancient chinese art of tai chi, which helps maintain visibility and balance. flexibility and balance. and that's always been foxconn�*s strength. moving calmly through political and economic headwinds, it's had to learn to be fluid and nimble to thrive. through talks...

as we wrap up our discussion, young liu had some words of advice for his partners in the united states. how do you think china's journey in technology is going? could it overtake the us in the future? from us�*s point of view, they have to move faster. china so far is behind, right, technology wise. you don't tell the follower to say, "you stop, 0k, because i don't move fast enough. you better stop." and i don't think that's the right approach. they should think the other way around. i should move much faster so the follower cannot catch up with us. it's the same answer to my shareholders. they ask me about, you know, how we are going to cope with our competitors from mainland china, 0k? what's our strategy?

i tell them — from foxconn�*s point of view, we have to move much faster so that they are not able to catch up. we cannot tell them to stop, 0k. so it's the same idea. from the country level�*s point of view, i think — my advice, i think, for the us, they have to move faster so that china, and another china in the future, they won't be able to catch up. thank you very much, chairman liu, for speaking to the bbc. thank you. hello. once again, some of you, thundery downpours on the way for tuesday. not a wash—out of a day,

there will be some brighter moments too, but especially for england and wales, that thundery rain comes from what was some of these clouds of the bay of biscay on monday edging their way northwards. and by the end of the night, into the start of the day, that rain will have set in across parts of wales and southern england. another humid start here in particular, tiny bit fresher further north, but temperatures in double figures. isolated shower for much of scotland, northern ireland, northern england. start the day dry with some sunshine, but spells of heavy, thundery rain work their way northwards and eastwards across much of england and wales. the worst of the overnight rain clearing the south west quite quickly, but some intense downpours in amongst that. but further east, east anglia, southeast, rainfall amounts will vary quite widely, some say not much at all. that heavy, thundery rain moves across northern england during the morning and early afternoon, affecting some eastern fringes of scotland as well. west of scotland, northern ireland, another day of sunny spells, but also some, well, scattered, heavy and thundery showers. and across england and wales, while skies will brighten into the afternoon, some slow moving thunderstorms possible here, not too many, but some of those could be

close to edgbaston on what will be another reasonably warm day. the rain to the far east of scotland to finish the day clears northwards as we go into wednesday night. most will then have a dry night, a few isolated showers out into the far northwest, but temperatures 11—14 celsius, with a little less humidity out there. it should feel a touch more comfortable for some of you for sleeping. but there is a change for wednesday in that whilst we've also got low pressure close by to the north, which will be prone to bringing showers northern half the country, the winds will be westerly. so showers will develop, but they'll move through across the skies quite quickly. so it'll be a chopping and changing day for scotland, northern ireland and northern england, some of the showers heavy and thundery. further south, though, fewer showers and more of you will be dry. and with some longer sunny spells, temperatures should lift a little bit across the south, up to 25—26 celsius. for the end of the week, brief ridge of high pressure tries to push its way into southern eastern areas. weather fronts always close by to the west, so it does look like we will still see some rain at times, especially across the western half of the country.

but in the sunnier moments, it's going to turn increasingly humid. 29 possible this weekend in the london area, but not completely without the rain. and with lots of events going on through this week and weekend, check the latest details for where you're heading on the bbc weather app. take care.

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