Micron Technology executive vice president of global operations Manish Bhatia is starting to see some smartphone demand coming back in China, post-COVID-19 lockdown.
Brian Sozzi for Yahoo Finance:
“We are starting to see some demand coming back [in China]. Certainly it was a big reduction in our last quarter because supply of smartphones weren’t available because so many of the smartphone factories were shut down in the first quarter. We’ve seen those start to come back up and we’ve seen some consumer spending,” said Micron Technology executive vice president of global operations Manish Bhatia on Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade.
Micron is one of the word’s largest producers of DRAM and NAND flash memory chips. Its chips are instrumental building blocks in smartphones… Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted on an earnings call last week demand in China continued to recover through April.
If you look at what happened in China, we were having a really good January. The lockdowns started there toward the end of January, as you know. February, we saw a steep decline in demand. We closed our stores in February. As the lockdown completed in mid-February, toward the second half of February, we began to open stores. We opened them on a staggered basis that took about 30 days until mid-March.
And from a demand point of view, we saw an improvement in March over February. And if you look at kind of where we are today, we’ve seen further improvement in April as compared to March. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, April 30, 2020
MacDailyNews Take: It’s certainly good to see some smartphone demand coming back in China. From time to time, glimmers of hope peek through the gloom!
