Foxconn halts recruitment (2)

Liu did not comment on such speculations, but said the halt is not an indication that the company is downsizing its production.

Foxconn is expanding rapidly in the Chinese mainland, where the number of employees has grown to the current 1.2 million from around 600,000 back in 2009, according to Liu.

He also said that the high return rate of workers after this year's Spring Festival may be a reason for the halt in recruitment, giving as an example Foxconn's Shenzhen plant, where nearly 97 percent of employees have decided to return after the holidays.

"The retention rate has been significantly higher after the company increased employees' salary in the mainland," Liu said. He noted that average salaries of Foxconn employees in the mainland have gone up by around 160 percent since 2010.

Li Youhuan, director of the Comprehensive Development Research Center at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, said that the increasing use of manufacturing robots by Foxconn may also be a reason for Foxconn's recruitment halt.

Terry Gou, president of Foxconn, announced in 2011 a plan to replace some workers with 1 million robots by 2014 in order to cut rising labor expenses.

Gou also said in 2011 that Foxconn's industrial robot production base in North China's Shanxi Province is expected to top 50 billion yuan ($8.01 billion) in output by 2016.

"A higher level of automation will surely reduce labor use in the future, but it is unlikely that robots will totally replace human labor," Li said, noting that hiring has become increasingly difficult for Foxconn as more and more workers are unsatisfied with the company's highly repetitive jobs.