Monarch Tractors won’t be built by Foxconn after Ohio factory sale

Foxconn will no longer build electric tractors for California startup Monarch Tractor after the Taiwanese tech giant recently sold its Ohio factory to SoftBank.

Monarch CEO Praveen Penmetsa confirmed the news in a LinkedIn comment Tuesday. He also said his company worked with Foxconn to “build up inventory” before the sale of the factory, noting his startup has “enough to meet customer demand for the next 12 months, along with ample spare parts.”

“In the coming weeks, we will be sharing more about our plans to introduce more Monarch-enabled products in the market through new manufacturing partnerships,” Penmetsa wrote.

Following the sale, SoftBank is expected to work with Foxconn to use the factory to make equipment for the Stargate AI project led by OpenAI and Oracle.

Foxconn purchased the former General Motors factory from EV startup Lordstown Motors in 2022. Young Liu, Foxconn’s chairman, said prior to the sale closing that the facility was going to be the “most important electric vehicle manufacturing and R&D hub in North America.”

Monarch was one of four companies Foxconn promoted as customers (or potential customers) of the electric vehicle contract manufacturing operation it tried to establish at the former General Motors factory. Foxconn built a few hundred tractors for Monarch at the plant, but the startup has struggled. Last year, it went through two rounds of layoffs and had to quickly pivot to new types of customers as California’s wine industry crashed.

The other three companies Foxconn wanted to build vehicles for have all filed for bankruptcy. While Foxconn made a handful of Lordstown Motors pickups at the plant, the startup went under in 2023. The other two prospective customers were Fisker Inc. and a small California startup called IndiEV. Foxconn never built any vehicles for those companies at the factory, and they have also both since gone out of business.

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