Foxconn and many other manufacturers are shutting down operations in Shenzhen as the city government is back in lockdown.
The partial lockdown was implemented after the discovery of a new COVID-19 case in the city. On Sunday (13/3), 60 cases of COVID-19 were found, and now 17 million residents in the city will undergo PCR tests, and non-essential businesses have been ordered to temporarily close until March 20, 2022.
Shenzhen is the base for a number of major technology companies, such as Huawei, Oppo, and TCL. The city is also one of the biggest hubs for Foxconn, which is a component supplier and assembler for companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon.
Foxconn said in a statement that it would stop production at factories located in Longhua and Guanlan until further notice from the local government. Production will temporarily be shifted to their factory in another city.
For Foxconn, Shenzhen is their second largest base in China after Zhenzhou, which is the world's largest iPhone assembly center. Almost all of the prototyping, research and development is done at their facility located in Shenzhen.
Besides Foxconn, Unimicron, the largest PCB board maker from Taiwan, also stopped production on Monday. Unimicron is a supplier of PCB boards for Apple, Intel and Nvidia.
However Unimicron ensures that their main product, the ajinomoto build film (ABF) substrate, is not made in Shenzhen. So this operational shutdown should not exacerbate the existing condition, namely the global shortage of ABF substrate supply.
Apart from Shenzhen, this lockdown was also implemented in Shanghai after 64 new cases were found. Inter-provincial buses are prohibited from operating and anyone wanting to leave or come to the city must show a negative PCR result.
So far, the Chinese government is still carrying out various strict rules to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In total there have been 4,636 deaths and 119,902 cases reported since the start of the pandemic, according to data from Worldometer.