China power cuts interrupt Apple production lines
Multiple Apple iPhone suppliers in China have halted production for days to comply with new regulations regarding electricity consumption.
Tim Cook visiting China production
Not all Apple suppliers in China have yet been affected, and some of those which have, have instead limited their operations for other companies instead. However, manufacturers of iPhone components ranging from motherboards to speakers have been forced to halt work for several days.
According to Reuters, the issue is caused by new regulations aimed at toughening emissions standards, plus China's tightened coal supplies affecting industry.
Unimicron Technology Group, which makes motherboards for the iPhone, closed three of it subsidiaries from noon on September 26 to midnight on September 30. A spokesperson said it was to, "comply with the local government's electricity limiting policy."
The spokesperson says the company's other plants will make up the production loss. Similarly, speaker manufacturer Concraft Holding plans to use its inventory to meet demand while it suspends production for five days.
Unnamed sources have told Reuters that Foxconn, Apple's largest supplier, has seen only a "very small" impact. It's seemingly been confined to non-Apple production, too, with the company adjusting staff shifts to move work to October.
Foxconn affiliate Eson Precision Industry Co, however, has suspended production from Sunday to Friday. Apple's processor supplier, TSMC, reports no impact at its China plants.
Separately, TSMC has recently informed its customers that the cost of processors will be increasing.
Read on AppleInsider
Tim Cook visiting China production
Not all Apple suppliers in China have yet been affected, and some of those which have, have instead limited their operations for other companies instead. However, manufacturers of iPhone components ranging from motherboards to speakers have been forced to halt work for several days.
According to Reuters, the issue is caused by new regulations aimed at toughening emissions standards, plus China's tightened coal supplies affecting industry.
Unimicron Technology Group, which makes motherboards for the iPhone, closed three of it subsidiaries from noon on September 26 to midnight on September 30. A spokesperson said it was to, "comply with the local government's electricity limiting policy."
The spokesperson says the company's other plants will make up the production loss. Similarly, speaker manufacturer Concraft Holding plans to use its inventory to meet demand while it suspends production for five days.
Unnamed sources have told Reuters that Foxconn, Apple's largest supplier, has seen only a "very small" impact. It's seemingly been confined to non-Apple production, too, with the company adjusting staff shifts to move work to October.
Foxconn affiliate Eson Precision Industry Co, however, has suspended production from Sunday to Friday. Apple's processor supplier, TSMC, reports no impact at its China plants.
Separately, TSMC has recently informed its customers that the cost of processors will be increasing.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Between increasing arrogance, militarism, wolf warrior diplomacy, and territorial claims of the entire South China Sea, its increasing isolation from the world at large is leading to things like retaliatory stopping the import of Australian coal which is crippling its economy.
China was given significant economic advantages by liberal western democracies hoping that bring them into world organizations would liberalize the country and bring western values to China, but instead China has taken and used its assets and position to subjugate lesser economies through things like the Belt and Roads Initiative to export uneconomical large capital projects to poorer nations placing them in enormous debt, and bought their votes in international organizations enabling them leverage undue influence in things like the World Health Organization and United Nations committees on Human Rights despite a total suppression of freedom of the press and massive human rights violations against dissidents and minorities.
Heck, they were only narrowly averted from taking over the committee on Intellectual Property despite their IP raids on foreign companies and failure to license IP they use every day, and counterfeit companies and products.
Their one child policy crippled its population growth in a country where there are few social support structure, and the increasingly aging population is supported by only a single offspring. The economy is rife with corruption caused by laws which require party members on any large corporation's board, with little or no accountability which means those party members loot the company's coffers - and there's no meaningful auditing of finances which leads to disasters like Lukin Coffee and Evergrande.
Xi Jinping has suppressed all dissent and through multiple purges has diminished any chance that he could be toppled, and as more and more things go wrong with the Chinese economy he's prematurely taken Hong Kong and been building his military forces and greedily eyeing prosperous Taiwan.
although www.freightened.com/the-film/ suggests it became cheaper to ship than to build and run factories and outlines resulting environmental costs
Both are more like third world countries than superpowers, except for the party and their militaries.
Thanks Cisco for building the CCP the great firewall of China, so the average Chinese Citizen only gets news and truth from party sources, so their minds can be moulded with whatever the party says. The current CCP spiel is that the coronavirus came from a leak at Fort Dietrik, and that western powers are threatening China and that's the reason for the military buildup.
It really looks like Xi Jinping is preparing China for war, since he needs a distraction from all the things going wrong in China.
The one good thing that Trump did in his presidency is push back against China, and eliminate the trade imbalance which was caused by liberal democracies during the Clinton era granting trade concessions in the hope of making Chinese values more like western democracies. This caused the west to ship most of their manufacturing jobs to China, and only recently have western companies realized their peril and begun pulling manufacturing out of China: which is another factor causing major disruption in the Chinese economy.
Unfortunately, I believe that Apple has a large number of CNC machines used in their manufacturing, and you can't just put those in a #10 envelope and mail them out to better climes.
They have prototype manufacturing on shore in the US, that will never be seen, they are the people that will never work at home.
A quarter of the US is third world these days, and Russia has a bigger problem with China, the Russian far east will not be white Russian by the end of this century….