Recruitment at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou and Shenzhen plants has stopped, and many other plants have been asked to stop recruiting, according to CBN Daily.

Insiders said employment reduction on the one hand is being done to adjust the production line, and on the other hand, it is Foxconn preparing for an artificial intelligence production.

At the Henan Foxconn online recruitment center, there is a notice saying that because of production line adjustments, recruitment has been changed, and the Zhengzhou plant has stopped recruitment since December and there will be no large-scale recruitment until June.

A worker at the Henan Employment Center said the recruitment suspension might have  something to do with the diminished output of the iphone 5.

On the seventh day of Spring Festival last year, Foxconn’s Longhua factory recruited 5,000 people, and the number before Lantern Festival was up to 3 million. In contrast, only a few dozen people are hovering outside the Foxconn factory this year, according to CBN Daily.

“The referral fee last year was up to 1,500 yuan ($240.3), but now it’s zero, a lot of people were on vacation early because of the capacity cuts last November,” a Foxconn worker wrote on his Weibo.

Insiders said what’s behind the recruitment suspension is the overall consideration of the manufacturing prospects.

“Our goal is to see the first batch of fully automated factory in 5-10 years and to eliminate simple and repetitive processes through automation in the next few years,” said Guo Taiming, CEO of Foxconn.  

“The robot project has been finalized, and the total investment is about 3 billion yuan,” said one staff member at the industrial park in Yiyang county, Luoyang, Henan province. Besides Luoyang, the robot project has begun in Jincheng, Shanxi province.

Li Youhuan, director of the Guangdong Comprehensive Development of Social Science Research Center, said that automated robots can improve production efficiency, reduce costs and increase profits. But he also pointed out that because of the complexity of Foxconn’s production process, most manufacturing procedures may need to be done manually.