Hon Hai Precision Industry, the world's biggest contract electronics maker, is planning to relocate its advanced processing operations from China to Taiwan amid rising labor costs in China, a Taiwan economics official said Wednesday. Terry Gou, the founder and chairman of Hon Hai, has been in discussions since late last year with Taiwan's Ministry of Economics Affairs on the possibility of setting up a unmanned factory near the company's headquarters in Tucheng City, northern Taiwan, said the official who asked not to be named. However, there is no available space for the factory at the moment, the official told the Central News Agency, adding that the ministry is working to solve the problem. 'Hon Hai does not plan to move its factory in Shenzhen back to Taiwan, the official said. 'Instead, it wants to relocate its advanced processing operation.' Hon Hai has been in the spotlight since early this year when the first of 12 workers at its Shenzhen factory committed suicide. In addition to Hon Hai, at least two other Taiwanese electronics companies plan to return to Taiwan because workers at their China factories are demanding higher wages, the official said. These companies want the ministry to help them find a location for their factories and allow them to hire more foreign workers, the official disclosed. As wages in Taiwan are relatively high, it will not make economic sense for companies to relocate from China and engage in the processing operations that they now have there, the official said. Hsieh Chi-tung, the deputy head of an association of China-based Taiwanese businesses, told reporters Wednesday that many Taiwanese companies want to return from China but the Taiwan government will first have to help them deal with the problem of labor shortage. He noted that while there are Indonesian and Filipino workers in Taiwan who would accept lower wages than Taiwanese workers, there is the problem of language and cultural barriers. To deal with this problem, the Taiwan government should allow Chinese workers into Taiwan, he suggested. At a press conference after Hon Hai's shareholders meeting the previous day, Gou said that his company will relocate some of its production lines to central and western China to capitalize on the cheaper labor there. Chien Pei-pin, a senior analyst with Digitimes Research, told selfnews Wednesday that central and western China could be the next major production sites for electronics companies, as the Chinese government plans to step up the development of those areas in the next decade. 