The World's 20 Largest Manufacturing Plants, by Employees

It has its own hospital, fire brigade, four swimming pools, and TV network. It is not a city, it is a single factory. Foxconn's Longhua campus in Shenzhen employs roughly 250,000 people, making it the largest manufacturing site on Earth by headcount. It is also just one of seventeen Asian plants on this map. None of the world's 20 biggest factories are in the Americas.

Together, the 20 sites employ ~1.36 million people which represents a workforce larger than the population of Estonia.

By the numbers

• Foxconn's Longhua campus (Shenzhen) leads at ~250,000 employees, more workers than the next two plants combined.
• 17 of the top 20 plants are in Asia. The remaining three are in Germany. None are in the Americas.
• China hosts 7 of the 20 sites, followed by South Korea (4), Germany (3), India (3), Vietnam (2), and Russia (1).
• Three companies operate 12 of the 20 plants: Foxconn, BYD, and Samsung.
• Foxconn Zhengzhou (#2, ~175,000 workers) makes roughly 80% of the world's iPhones and hired 50,000 staff in two weeks ahead of the iPhone 16 launch.

Beyond the headcount

VW Wolfsburg's most-produced item isn't a car. In 2023, the plant turned out 8.3 million currywurst sausages, more than vehicles. The sausage has its own VW part number: 199 398 500 A.

BASF Ludwigshafen has its own zip codes. The 39,000-employee chemical site contains 2,000+ buildings, 106 km of streets, 230 km of rail track, and an internal fire department.

Pou Chen's PouYuen factory in Ho Chi Minh City makes shoes for Nike, Adidas, Converse, and Timberland under one roof, believed to be the largest footwear factory on Earth.

Hyundai's Ulsan plant has its own deepwater port where car-carrier ships dock directly at the factory. It is the world's largest single-site car plant by volume.

Samsung's Pyeongtaek campus is the world's largest semiconductor fab complex. Its cleanrooms are roughly 10,000× cleaner than a hospital operating theatre (workers cannot wear makeup).

Foxconn Longhua is a walled city of 15 factories, a hospital, a fire brigade, four swimming pools, and an internal TV network. Anti-suicide nets were installed after 14 worker deaths in 2010.

The ranking is by site-level headcount, not corporate-wide employment, and counts permanent and direct workforce, not the wider contractor population that floats through industrial sites of this scale. Where a company operates adjacent campuses and reports them as one operation (Maruti Suzuki's Gurugram and Manesar plants, ~30 km apart), they are treated as a single entry.