Apple's Foxconn Set to Slash Expenses, Jobs Amid US-China Trade War

Electricals manufacturing giant Foxconn plans to reduce its budget by billions and lay off thousands of staff due to the ongoing US-China trade war and tech slowdown.

Foxconn employs over 800,000 staff in Taiwan and mainland China, but will cut non-technical staff by roughly 10 percent, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

It will be "a very difficult and competitive year" due to the crunch, tech giant Apple said in an internal memo as it plans to reduce its spending budget by £2.29bn ($2.9bn).

The news comes after Apple's stocks slid 3.96 percent on the Dow Jones on Tuesday alongside social media behemoth Facebook, who lost 5.72 percent.

FAANG companies, or Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, are the world's top five tech companies, with all seeing 20 percent drops in profits this year.

Last week, four of Apple's suppliers lowered their revenue expectations amid turmoil unfolding due to market saturation as well as US President Donald Trump's tariff battle with Beijing.

California-based supplier Lumentum is expecting cuts in orders and British chipmaker IQE lost 28 percent of stocks in one day, The Telegraph reported.

Foxconn, a Taiwanese company with operations in Zhengzhou, PRC, is one of the world's largest assemblers of laptops, mobiles, gaming consoles and other electricals. Taiwan is considered an inseparable province of China.