iPhone production grinds to a halt in India due to mandatory lockdown order

Shawn Knight

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The big picture: What sort of impact – if any – the shutdowns will have on iPhone manufacturing remains to be seen. According to Bloomberg, the Indian facilities are mostly responsible for churning out older iPhone models meaning the impact on newer models could be minimal.

Two of Apple’s key manufacturing partners have suspended operations in India to comply with local lockdown orders.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this week issued a 21-day mandatory and total lockdown of the country’s more than 1.3 billion residents. It’s the world’s largest lockdown, encompassing close to a fifth of the globe’s population.

Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai precision Industry Co., and Wistron Corp, help some of the world’s top electronics makers including Apple manufacture goods.

Foxconn confirmed the shutdown in a message to Bloomberg, noting that production in India would be suspended until April 14. Wistron also confirmed it was adhering to the lockdown order but didn’t say when it would again be operational. Apple did not provide an immediate comment when contacted by the publication.

Both Foxconn and Wistron are headquartered in Taiwan, presumably where the majority of their manufacturing efforts also take place. As early as last week, there was optimism that the iPhone 12 would enter production on schedule and that its launch later this year wasn’t in jeopardy.

Of course, a lot can (and has) happened over the course of a week so who knows what Apple’s roadmap looks like today.

Image credit: zhu difeng, Mykola Churpita

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Awwwwwwwww ..... those poor people. Forced to use their old, out-of-date phones for another year .... they are my thoughts and prayers (thinking they are *****s and praying they grow up soon!)
 
Those are very Asian looking workers in that Indian factory :)
I wonder if you can run a distributed Indian scam call centre from your homes? In the same way that Sweden has retrained their now-unemployed airline staff into healthcare assistants, India could recruit all the Apple workers into a new job from the comfort of their own homes!
 
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