“Apple Inc. shares fell in early trading after Foxconn Technology Group, the biggest assembler of Apple products, froze hiring across China,” Amy Thomson and Tim Culpan report for Bloomberg. “Apple fell as much as 1.9 percent to $451.25 in early U.S. trading and traded at $456.01 at 8:10 a.m. New York time. It declined to $459.99 yesterday.”

“Foxconn halted recruitment until the end of March after more employees returned from the Chinese New Year break than a year earlier, Bruce Liu, a spokesman for the Taipei-based company, said today in a phone interview,” Thomson and Culpan report. “The decision wasn’t related to iPhone 5 production, he said.”

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MacDailyNews Take: And the hunt for a real reason for AAPL to decline continues – besides rampant fomenting, of which this is yet another example, of course.