SHANGHAI: Protesters have made a traditional Chinese funeral offering to the dead at the headquarters of Foxconn, the makers of Apple's iPad, after the 11th suicide attempt - nine of them successful - at the company's factories so far this year.

Li Hai, a 19-year-old man from Hunan province, fell to his death from the roof of a dormitory building at Foxconn's Longhua factory on Tuesday, leaving the world's largest electronics manufacturer in crisis.

The spate of suicides at Foxconn has highlighted concerns over working conditions inside the giant Longhua factory, where 300,000 workers assemble goods for clients including Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Dell and Nokia. The death comes as Apple, which has not commented, prepares to launch the iPad in Australia.

The Longhua factory is the biggest in the world and is responsible for 20 per cent of exports emerging from Shenzhen, the one-time fishing village now one of the capitals of the world's manufacturing industry.

In the lobby of Foxconn's headquarters in Hong Kong, two dozen activists laid mannequins to rest and conducted funeral rites. ''We are staging the protest because of the high death rate [at Foxconn], with an abnormal number of workers committing suicide in the past five months,'' said Debby Chan, a spokesman for Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour.