Chinese Worker Commits Suicide After Losing iPhone Prototype

Last Thursday, 25 year-old Sun Danyong committed suicide after a fourth generation iPhone prototype he was responsible for went missing, according to VentureBeat.

Sun, a recent engineering graduate was working for Foxconn in Shenzhen. He was responsible for shipping iPhone prototypes from Foxconn to Apple.

According to news reports coming out of China, on Thursday, July 9th, Sun got 16 prototype phones from the assembly line at a Foxconn factory. At some point in the next few days, he discovered that one of them was missing. He believed that the device had been left at the factory but was unable to find it. On Monday, July 13, he reported the missing phone to his boss.


Two days later three Foxconn employees searched his apartment — illegally, according to Chinese law. Accusations suggest that Sun was detained and physically abused during the investigation, although this has not been substantiated .

On Thursday shortly after 3 a.m. the surveillance video of his building shows Sun jumping out of a window in his apartment to his death.

Apple is known to place incredible pressure on their partners to maintain the secrecy surrounding their products. Unfortunately, this pressure may have been exerted on an employee who was unable to cope.

Steven Lin, a Chinese blogger and marketer, explains the situation:


Students [like Sun] have been studying in schools for years, and they have been carefully protected by their parents. They can’t endure such pressure - ‘their house being illegally searched,’ or ‘house arrests’ (if that’s true, according some reports news). Employees at these and other factories sometimes kill themselves simply because of the pressure from their daily jobs — you know what’s going to happen when they face more serious threats. Also, most young Chinese guys don’t have friends who are lawyers, so they don’t know how to protect themselves in the legal system. They won’t even look for help from the legal system. They will just endure the pressure, and finally find an extreme way to end all their troubles.

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