Apple Wants To Shift iPhone Production To India, Vietnam & Completely Ignore China For This Reason

Recently, Apple is accelerating its plans to shift some of its production outside China.

The Cupertino headquartered company is asking its suppliers to plan more for assembling the product elsewhere in Asia, particularly India and Vietnam.

Apple Shifting Assembly Line Outside Of China

Sources involved in this discussion also said that Apple is also looking to reduce the dependence on Taiwanese assemblers led by the Foxconn Technology Group, as per the information provided in the Wall Street Journal.

It appears that the turmoil at China’s Zhengzhou ‘iPhone City’ plant propels Apple to shift its production. 

The Zhengzhou city In China has as many as 300,000 workers working at a factory run by Foxconn which manufactures iPhones and other Apple products. 

The market research firm Counterpoint Research said that it alone made up about 85 percent of the Pro lineup of iPhones at one point.

Foxconn Plant Struggled To Contain COVID-19 Outbreak

Earlier, Apple was in the news for the protests that erupted at the world’s largest iPhone factory in central China in late November.

Then authorities at the Foxconn plant struggled to contain a COVID-19 outbreak while maintaining production ahead of the peak holiday season.

We could see in videos protesting online, the protesters were shouting “Stand up for your rights!” Riot police were present, the videos show. 

Media agency has verified the location of one of the videos also by video verification service Storyful, as per the Wall Street Journal report.

Weakened China’s Status As Stable Manufacturing Center

It seems that the happenings in a year of time have weakened China’s status as a stable manufacturing center.

It won’t be an exaggeration to say that the disruption means Apple no longer feels comfortable having so much of its business tied up in one place, the analysts and people in the Apple supply chain said.

Moving ahead, the iPhone maker has informed its manufacturing partners that it wants them to start trying to do more of this work outside of China. 

According to the supply-chain specialists, in case the places such as India and Vietnam can do NPI too, they will remain stuck playing second fiddle. 

Basically, the slowing global economy and slowing hiring at Apple have affected the tech giant to allocate personnel for NPI work with new suppliers and new countries, said the sources.

In the meantime, China is further scrambling Apple’s strained supply.

They are to highlight how the country’s stringent zero-Covid policy is hurting global technology firms.