Jobs says Foxconn ‘not a sweatshop’ after worker deaths

‘Suicides’ at Chinese factory ‘troubling’ says Apple chief executive at All Things Digital conference in US

Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, finds “troubling” a string of worker deaths at Foxconn, the contract manufacturer that assembles the company’s iPhones and iPads, but said its factory in China “is not a sweatshop”.

Jobs was making his first public comments about employees’ apparent suicides at a complex operated by the unit of Hon Hai Precision Industry, which also counts Hewlett-Packard and Dell among its clients.

At this year’s All Things Digital conference, an annual gathering of A-list technology and media executives in California, Jobs sniped at Adobe Systems’s “waning” Flash technology, vowed not to get into a search battle with Google, and waxed lyrical about the future of tablet PCs.

Jobs also talked about how he conceived the iPad even before the iPhone. Apple released the iPad in April and it has quickly defined the tablet computer market, selling more than 2,000,000 units in the first 60 days.

But a string of deaths at Foxconn’s base in southern China, which critics blame on stressful working conditions, threatens to cast a shadow over the device’s success.

“It’s a difficult situation,” Jobs said on stage. “We’re trying to understand right now, before we go in and say we know the solution.”

The iPad‘s momentum has helped drive share gains. Apple last week overtook long-time nemesis Microsoft to become the world’s largest technology company by market value – an event unthinkable a decade ago – and Apple’s shares have spent much of 2010 hitting new highs.

Shares of Cupertino, California-based Apple, rose 1.5% yesterday to end at $260.8 on the Nasdaq.

“For those of us that have been in the industry a long time, it’s surreal. But it doesn’t matter very much, it’s not what’s important,” Jobs said. “It’s not what makes you come to work every morning.”

Jobs has appeared at the event in previous years, but not since 2007. Much has changed for Apple – and its chief executive – in that period. A pancreatic cancer survivor, the company’s founder underwent a liver transplant a year ago.

The company’s growing clout and business ambitions have also increasingly put it at the centre of several high-profile disputes and in the regulatory spotlight.

The US justice department is making preliminary inquiries into whether Apple unfairly dominates the digital music market through its iTunes store, sources say.

Hostility between Apple and Adobe has been brewing for months. Apple has criticised Flash as a buggy battery hog, while Adobe has accused Apple of exerting tyrannical control over developers creating programs for the iPhone and iPad.

“We didn’t start off to have a war with Flash or anything else. We just made a technical decision,” he said.

Adobe’s Flash multimedia technology allows video and interactive media on the web.

Apple is widely expected to unveil its newest iPhone next Monday, when Jobs delivers his keynote address at its developers’ conference in San Francisco.

Consumers may already have seen the next iPhone after a prototype, famously lost by an Apple employee at a bar earlier this year, was purchased and displayed online by a technology blog.

Jobs said there was debate about whether the phone was picked up after being left at the bar, or stolen.

“This is a story that’s amazing,” Jobs said. “It’s got theft. It’s got buying stolen property. It’s got extortion. I’m sure there’s sex in there somewhere. Somebody should make a movie out of this.”