Half of Apple’s 200 top suppliers have facilities in and around Shanghai, China where the Chinese Communist Party’s quixotic quest for “zero-COVID” has caused extensive and extended lockdowns and other restrictions are disrupting many business activities.
Lauly Li, Cheng Ting-Fang, and Shunsuke Tabeta for Nikkei Asia:
More than 70 companies own manufacturing plants in Jiangsu Province that directly supply the U.S. tech giant, according to an analysis of Apple’s latest available Supplier List. The majority of these are in Kunshan and Suzhou, the two cities near Shanghai. A further 30 or so Apple suppliers have facilities in Shanghai itself, the latest epicenter of the COVID-19 surge in China.
These suppliers run the gamut from major iPhone assembler Pegatron and iPad maker Compal Electronics to makers of components such as displays, printed circuit boards, thermal parts, batteries and acoustic components.
Most of these suppliers, moreover, serve not only Apple but also global and domestic tech giants from Google, Microsoft and Intel to Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo.
Foreign and domestic businesses have warned that the prolonged lockdowns could put China’s economic growth at risk and deal a huge blow to the automobile and tech industries…
China is officially committed to a “zero-COVID” policy, and many suppliers with production facilities in the region are worried it will take months for normal operations to resume.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote over 16 months ago (aging like a fine wine):
In general, human-transmissible coronaviruses do not disappear. There is no such thing as zero-COVID.
COVID-19 is here to stay. It will very likely become endemic, yet pose less danger over time. People will acquire immunity via vaccines (effectiveness TDB) and naturally as they contract and recover from variants like omicron since the partially-effective vaccines permit not only transmissibility, but also breakthrough infections. Influenza and the four human coronaviruses that cause common colds (OC43, 229E, NL63 and HKU1) are, of course, also endemic, but a combination of annual flu vaccines and acquired immunity means that sane societies tolerate the unavoidable seasonal deaths and illnesses they bring without requiring lockdowns, masks, social distancing, indefinite return-to-work delays, etc.
At which point, if ever, will some people decide that wasting away their short lives in abject fear of a bad flu, very likely engineered by China and partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is a hysterical self-defeating overreaction? – MacDailyNews, December 16, 2021
More fine wine:
The real virus is the panic. – MacDailyNews, March 9, 2020
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