Hon Hai to hire 3,000 employees to develop devices and software for Mozilla's Firefox OS

Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision said Thursday it aims to hire up to 3,000 new employees to develop devices and software for Mozilla's Firefox operating system as it seeks to diversify from its core manufacturing services.

They will mainly be engineers responsible for software research and development on the Linux-based open source operating system and cloud computing at a software technology park in the southern city of Kaohsiung, the tech giant said in a statement.

Hon Hai, better known by its trade name Foxconn and a major supplier to Apple, announced the Mozilla tie-up earlier this month as it looks to move beyond manufacturing services which yield low margins.

Under the agreement, Hon Hai will work with Mozilla to promote the non-profit organisation's Firefox operating system. It plans to produce five devices running on Firefox.

The operating system will allow HTML5 apps to communicate directly with the hardware and is being developed by Mozilla as an open web mobile operating system.

Hon Hai has said that it hopes the platform will become another option for clients aside from Android and Apple's iOS.

Foxconn is the world's largest computer component manufacturer and assembles products for Apple including the iPhone plus Sony and Nokia.

The group employs about one million workers in China, roughly half of them based in its main facility in Shenzhen bordering Hong Kong.