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Taipei - Here's a challenge to President-elect Donald Trump's plan to be bring jobs back to America before his inauguration on January 20.
In an announcement made just before the new year, Foxconn's flagship Hon Hai Precision Industry said it will spend $8.8bn to build a massive display-panel factory for its joint venture with Sharp Corp.
Crucially, the location chosen by Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou is China, not the US.
The obvious setback is that this is 8.8bn greenbacks that won't be pumped into Trump's America.
But the loss is deeper.
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Of all the areas where Apple and its partners might have found job opportunities for American manufacturing, display panels looked among the most promising.
Let me digress to explain the various stages of iPhone manufacturing.
Some areas require expensive equipment and materials, including semiconductors and electronic screens; others lean more on labor, such as final assembly.
It's Foxconn's army of assembly workers that gets all the press, but in the multi-step process of iPhone manufacturing far more value is added by workers elsewhere in the supply chain.
These are the people who set up the multibillion-dollar semiconductor equipment that builds Apple's A-series processors, work the metal-carving machines and shuttle pieces through each step to make an iPhone's gleaming shell, or shepherd sheets of glass through the cocktail of chemicals that make a razor-thin, crystal-clear Retina display.
These aren't wage-sensitive jobs, but the kinds of high-quality manufacturing positions that the president-elect pledged to create.
If any parts of the iPhone-manufacturing process are to be shifted to the US to create valuable jobs, then the best candidates are in capital-intensive areas such as chips and displays, or automated processes like metal carving and plastic molding.
In displays, where oversupply has forced the industry to wear billions of dollars in losses over the past decade, building a factory in China immediately cuts the chances for a plant in the US and with it the prospects for new jobs that could have numbered in the thousands.
And it's not just displays.
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Every time any manufacturer chooses to invest in China, they're deciding not to build in America - in most cases the US isn't even considered.
To his credit, what Donald Trump has done is to force executives to entertain the idea of opening factories in the US.
Yet as I outlined in my parody letter from Terry Gou to Donald Trump last month, entertaining an idea isn't the same as acting on it, even if an executive comes to Trump Towers for a photo op.
This decision by Foxconn shows that simply putting the US back on the table won't make America great again.
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