At first it looks like very expensive rubber. But Samuel Fu dips his finger into a disc of carbon nanotubing and pulls. And pulls, and pulls. The black spindles and foils spread out like a spider’s web until he stands a metre away.

Behind Mr Fu, surgical-masked workers and robot arms work with the new infinitely elastic material, which was developed jointly by China’s Tsinghua University and CNTouch, a subsidiary of Taiwanese manufacturing group Foxconn that is headed by Mr Fu.

The seemingly magical substance is the key to manufacturing a new generation of ultra efficient touchscreens, for cars and smartphones. It is part of an effort by Foxconn, which achieved fame as the maker of most of Apple’s products, to shed its image as an assembly line and reinvent itself, selling its own technology rather than snapping others’ products together.