Rick Romell

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Foxconn Technology Group will need engineers and other technical experts from Asia at its Wisconsin manufacturing complex, at least in the beginning, according to three display industry consultants.

The plant Foxconn plans to build in Mount Pleasant will be unlike anything in the U.S. and will require experienced hands to get it running smoothly and efficiently, the consultants said. Asia has the deepest pool of such people by far.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter,” said Foxconn is considering bringing people from China to help staff its Wisconsin plant amid difficulties finding engineers and others in a tight labor market.

Foxconn quickly denied the report, which attracted widespread attention, in part because Wisconsin is subsidizing the company based on the number of people it employs here.

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The state’s contract with Foxconn appears to allow subsidies for employees working in Wisconsin regardless of where they come from, a staff member with the Legislative Fiscal Bureau said this week.

“We can categorically state that the assertion that we are recruiting Chinese personnel to staff our Wisconsin project is untrue,” Foxconn said in a statement responding to the Wall Street Journal article.

“Our recruitment priority remains Wisconsin first and we continue to focus on hiring and training workers from throughout Wisconsin. We will supplement that recruitment from other U.S. locations as required.”

But the three consultants said it’s difficult to imagine how Foxconn could — or would want to — establish a large, complex display panel “fab” without the expertise and experience of people from Asia, the only place in the world that has such factories.

“I guarantee you they’re going to be bringing in some of their own engineers,” said Alan Brawn, principal with California-based Brawn Consulting.

“And they should bring them,” Brawn added. With no mass-production display panel plants in the U.S., he said, Foxconn will need help from overseas.

“If you don’t have a skill set here and you need that skill set, then you’ve got to import people,” Brawn said. “…That’s just common sense, and that’s the truth.”

Paul Semenza, an independent consultant in Santa Clara, Calif., agreed.

Such country-to-country migration was a well-known phenomenon as liquid crystal display fabs — which make the screens found in everything from smartphones and computer monitors to 75-inch TVs — spread across east Asia, he said.

“You had Japanese kind of going to Korea, and Taiwanese helping set up in China,” Semenza said. “That’s certainly how it worked in the past.”

Bob O’Brien, co-founder and president of Display Supply Chain Consultants, said there is “no question” that Foxconn will bring engineers and other experts from Asia as the Wisconsin plant is put into operation.

“The only question is how quickly can you transition … from an expatriate group within your workforce to a complete local group,” he said. “But yeah, there’s no one in the United States who knows how to run one of these fabs.”

O’Brien, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a former executive at Corning Inc., a major producer of glass for display panels.

Semenza has worked for the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, the National Research Council and for market researcher NPD Group, among others.

Brawn last March was named educator of the year by the Digital Signage Federation, and the organization subsequently decided to name the annual award after him.

Both Semenza and O’Brien said one reason to use Asian help here is to shorten the time needed to get the plant up to maximum efficiency.

“One of the critical success factors is how quickly can you get it up and running well,” O’Brien said.

While the U.S. has no major display production, the country does have people with deep knowledge of the industry, as many key pieces of equipment in panels are designed here, Semenza said.

But he also sees another, long-lasting factor in play: Foxconn is a Taiwanese company, so you’d expect that a significant slice of the management would come from Taiwan or perhaps Foxconn’s extensive operations in China.

“Just like if General Motors puts a plant in China, they send lots of Americans to make sure things go right,” he said.

Foxconn has begun building what it says will be a $10 billion manufacturing and research campus in Racine County, supported by 13,000 Wisconsin employees.

If it hits those targets, Foxconn could receive $3 billion in state subsidies — most of it from taxpayers — and another roughly $1 billion in aid from local government and utility ratepayers.