Foxconn, Apple’s main iPhone assembler is preparing to shift production to other parts of China afterworkers began fleeing its main hub to escape a COVID-19 outbreak.
Gloria Li, Ryan McMorrow, and Nian Liu for Financial Times:
City officials on Monday bussed workers away from the Zhengzhou plant, where staff say the company has failed to provide adequate food and a safe working environment during the outbreak, which is testing Apple’s supply chains.
Analysts say the factory complex represents about 60 per cent of Foxconn’s iPhone assembly capacity.
“We’re in peak production season right now so we need a lot of assembly-line workers… our company is co-ordinating back-up production capacity at other sites,” a spokesperson for the Foxconn plant told Chinese state media.
Ming-chi Kuo, an analyst at TF International Securities, estimated that the situation in Zhengzhou affected “more than 10 per cent of global iPhone production capacity”.
But Kuo said the Covid outbreak was not yet denting forecasts for Apple’s iPhone shipments in the current quarter. “It’s expected that Foxconn’s production capacity will gradually improve within a few weeks, and there should be a limited impact on the 4Q22 iPhone shipments,” he said.
MacDailyNews Take: God forbid, someone might get the sniffles.
The average age of workers on the Foxconn assembly line is 23 years old.
The reactions and overreactions to COVID in some places on this addled rock, even to this day, beggars belief.
The real virus is the panic. – MacDailyNews, March 9, 2020
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I haven’t seen anything about stock slippage in the headline of the Financial Times (that’s all I could read without subscribing).
Alpha and Delta are over. People had enough time to get vaccinated. The Omicron variants may be more contagious but so far the symptoms are much milder, especially for the immunized people. China is totally overreacting.
Overreacting, possibly, but sovereign. Their call.
China is in a very different situation that the western democracies. In the west, several efficacious and cost effective vaccines have widely available for over a year. At this point, if you haven’t protected yourself and become ill with COVID, it’s all on you.
China, for unknown reasons, refuses to buy western vaccines. Their own vaccines have proven less effective. China also has the problem of dramatically higher population densities. It apparently is unable to improve air quality and personnel separation in factories and apartment blocks. So yes, it does what The Party always does: mandate personal behavior. When that was the only tool available, then there was merit to curbing personal freedom temporarily. Now that the world has adequate vaccines to go around, it’s inexcusable.
Now one should ask why anyone would advocate single-party rule in any western democracy/republic. Especially when the politicians claiming only they can solve problems are typically the science-free heavy-handed ones who – they don’t even hide it anymore – support oligarchs in all things over the well being of the middle & working classes. They cite uneducated propaganda rather than peer-reviewed studies to attempt to justify their increasingly extreme opinions. Their blatant tactic is to lie to the masses and whip up fervor instead of actually proposing pragmatic solutions. This isn’t a partisan swipe, but when’s the last time any party in the US or UK for example actually proposed a specific solution to a problem? All they do is run attacks. It’s the scientists who reigned in the pandemic in the west. But the narcissistic idiots are as bad or worse than Xi. Most of these blowhards don’t listen to science any more than Xi does.