Company officials and unknown officials from the White House held talks on Friday regarding Foxconn's recent announcement that they're no longer building a factory in Wisconsin, but those talks did not result in any meaningful change to the company's plans.
What happened on Friday is Foxconn and the White House did damage control and released a statement that says nothing of any significance.
From CNBC:
Foxconn said it’s moving forward with the construction of its Wisconsin facility after talks with the White House, according to a statement released Friday, but isn’t clarifying what kind of jobs will be housed at the $10 billion plant. [...]
The site will function as both an “advanced manufacturing facility as well as a hub of high technology innovation,” Foxconn said in its new statement Friday, but did not clarify what kinds of jobs it would hire for at the site.
In a statement to CNBC earlier this week, Foxconn also signaled it was changing its focus for the Wisconsin facility, saying “the global market environment that existed when the project was first announced has changed.”
This is not materially different than what Foxconn officials said on Wednesday of last week.
Company officials previously said they're no longer building a factory and will instead build a "technology hub" that will include a packaging facility where finished products would be imported and prepared for shipment.
Without more details, to now say that they're building an "advance manufacturing facility" tells us nothing new and I suspect there is nothing new to know.
At the end of the day, the fact remains that Foxconn will not be building a factory that employs 13,000 people as they originally promised and their facility, assuming it's actually finished, probably won't even employ 3,000.