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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