Apple Supplier Foxconn Halts Operations at Its Shenzhen Sites Due to COVID-19 Lockdown

People wear masks to protect themselves from COVID-19, while listening to the annual general meeting at the lobby of Foxconn's office in Taipei, Taiwan on June 23, 2020. (Ann Wang/Reuters)

Foxconn has halted operations in the Chinese business center of Shenzhen after authorities announced a partial lockdown because of a rise in COVID-19 cases across the country, fueled by the highly transmissible Omicron virus variant.

In a March 13 statement, a spokesperson for the Taiwan-based Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., said it was suspending production at two campuses in Shenzhen “in compliance with the local government’s new Covid-19 policy.”

Foxconn is the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of electronics, supplying components to a number of companies that include Apple and Samsung.

Its two campuses in Shenzhen are located in Guanlan and Longhua, however, the company does the majority of its production at a plant located in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.

“Due to our diversified production sites in China, we have adjusted the production line to minimize the potential impact,” Foxconn said.

The company, which is owned by Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou, didn’t state when production at the Shenzhen base would resume. A spokesperson said the bases will remain closed until the local government says they can reopen, and in the meantime, facilities in other cities will be used to support production.

Foxconn said all employees have been required “to have COVID PCR test on top of existing prevention measures to ensure the health and safety of our employees.”

Shenzhen, a tech hub near Hong Kong, was placed under a citywide lockdown on March 14 amid a spike in new COVID-19 cases.

The lockdown comes amid the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) so-called “dynamic-zero” policy regarding coronavirus outbreaks, which utilizes strict measures such as mass testing, digital surveillance, mandatory isolation, and targeted lockdowns in an effort to control outbreaks.

Officials in Shenzhen have halted public transport and ordered all nonessential businesses to suspend operations March 14–20, the regime announced on March 13. Residents in the city of 17.5 million people have been ordered to work from home, and three rounds of citywide testing were to start on March 14.

There have been a total of 8,639 deaths and 709,726 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in China since Jan. 3, 2020, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization. However, the CCP has been criticized for underreporting its virus numbers.

Despite the strict measures put in place by the regime, the country is currently battling its biggest COVID-19 outbreak since the start of the pandemic.

Critics fear that such strict measures could cause further disruptions to the global supply chain.

A number of other prominent Chinese technology companies are located in Shenzhen, including SZ DJI Technology Co., Tencent, Oppo, and Huawei.

Foxconn’s touch panel subsidiary, General Interface Solution, also said it would allocate some of its production to other facilities amid the lockdown, Nikkei Asia reported.

A spokesperson for Unimicron, Taiwan’s largest manufacturer of printed circuit boards, told Nikkei Asia that its subsidiary in Shenzhen would pause production on March 14.