Electronics manufacturer Foxconn has admitted that student interns worked overtime and night shifts at a factory in northeast China in violation of company policy.

Students told Chinese media that more than a thousand of their classmates worked on basic tasks such as putting together and packaging parts for Sony’s PlayStation 4 consoles. The college programme at the factory in Yantai, Shandong province, was a graduation requirement, they said.

The admission is a blow to the Taiwanese company most famous for assembling Apple products, and comes in the same week as Terry Gou, its founder and chairman, lamented that young Chinese were shunning monotonous, low- paid assembly-line jobs.

The same factory last year admitted to having temporarily hired underage interns. – Copyright The Financial Times Service 2013