Chinese Apple suppliers given priority for factory restarts in Shanghai

As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) locked down Shanghai and nearby regions in its quixotic quest for “zero-COVID,” many suppliers halted production, with some shutdowns lasting weeks. As economic pains from the draconian policies grew, China has been pushing to resume factory operations, with Apple suppliers given priority for factory restarts.

Yang Jie for The Wall Street Journal:

In Kunshan, a city in Jiangsu about 30 miles west of Shanghai, the local government released a list last week that designated several major Apple suppliers, including Luxshare Precision Industry Co. and Wistron Corp., as “Covid-free” enterprises, granting them priority to resume production.
China’s central government has vowed to help restart factories, including Taiwan-based manufacturers. “We will continue to work with relevant authorities to actively assist Taiwanese companies to overcome the impact caused by the pandemic and help them resume production and operation as soon as possible,” said Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, on Wednesday. Many Apple suppliers are based in Taiwan.

MacDailyNews Take: The impact isn’t from the “pandemic,” the impact is from some countries’ and people’s overreaction to what was a bad flu that’s long since morphed into a bad cold, if that.

Chief Executive Tim Cook said Thursday that Apple’s constraints were mainly centered around the Shanghai corridor. The company’s estimate for as much as $8 billion in affected sales reflects the various ramp-ups necessary to get production back up and running, he said.
“On a positive front, almost all of the affected final-assembly factories have now restarted,” Mr. Cook said.
Quanta Computer Inc., a top assembler of MacBooks that is also Taiwan-based, has resumed some of its production at its Shanghai plant on April 15, state-run Xinhua News Agency reported last week. There, some 2,000 workers out of more than 40,000 returned to make products including laptops for Apple. That number was set to rise to around 6,000 workers by late April, according to Xinhua, which quoted a factory director.

MacDailyNews Take: For the amount of business Apple delivers to China, the company and its suppliers/assemblers deserve top priority.
Hopefully, the CCP is finally figuring out that “zero-COVID” is a pipe dream and will soon adopt reasonable, rational measures that do not violate its citizens’ basic human rights.
As we wrote over four months ago:
In general, human-transmissible coronaviruses do not disappear. There is no such thing as zero-COVID.
COVID-19 is here to stay. It will very likely become endemic, yet pose less danger over time. People will acquire immunity via vaccines (effectiveness TDB) and naturally as they contract and recover from variants like omicron since the partially-effective vaccines permit not only transmissibility, but also breakthrough infections. Influenza and the four human coronaviruses that cause common colds (OC43, 229E, NL63 and HKU1) are, of course, also endemic, but a combination of annual flu vaccines and acquired immunity means that sane societies tolerate the unavoidable seasonal deaths and illnesses they bring without requiring lockdowns, masks, social distancing, indefinite return-to-work delays, etc.
At which point, if ever, will some people decide that wasting away their short lives in abject fear of a bad flu, very likely engineered by China and partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is a hysterical self-defeating overreaction?

The real virus is the panic. – MacDailyNews, March 9, 2020

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