Foxconn: "We're not quitting the channel business"

During our visit to the Foxconn headquarters in Taipei today, besides looking at new products which the Taiwanese company has been busy developing in recent times, we had to ask a couple hard hitting questions.

We spoke with Andrew D. Ouyang and Sidney Tsai from the channel sales team - that's the folk who are responsible for marketing and selling its range of retail motherboards and othe products.

We asked Foxconn about the rumors floating around that Foxconn is going to quit the channel business of Foxconn branded and marketed products - and the question wasn't met with surprise. The answer we got that was that Foxconn are not quitting the channel business and that "we're still here", from Sidney Tsai.



And indeed they are still here - we had troubles believing the rumors when they first started a couple months ago or so. If Foxconn was quitting the channel business, why would they still be developing and selling new motherboards? Wouldn't they just fire all of their sales, marketing, product managers, engineers and so on, and be done with it?

The Foxconn channel sales group is purely focusing more on sales than marketing at this stage. More effort is being placed into direct sales, and as a result, it might appear as if Foxconn is going under from the outside. Foxconn had a surprisingly small presence at the large Computex Taipei trade show and according to Andrew and Sidney from Foxconn, it was because the head honchos decided to cut down on expenses and only personally invite its customers (distributors) to its private suite at the Grand Hyatt for a more targeted showing, while also keeping some of its upcoming technologies under its belt.

The channel sales group are also in the process of moving from their current office in Tucheng City to Nei Hu City in the next couple of weeks. And yes folks, they will keep making new products there. How about we rest these rumours?