China-covid: Largest iPhone manufacturing plant lifts lockdown

About 200.000 people work in this factory

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Taiwanese technology company Foxconn on Thursday ended the lockdown at the world's largest iPhone factory - which has been operating in a "closed circuit" for 56 days - after the general relaxation of health measures to deal with the covid-19 in China.

"Given (…) the lifting of epidemiological control measures in China, the company requires all its employees to present a negative PCR test within 48 hours before they can return to work," the company said in a statement, which was posted on the official WeChat account of “iPhone city”, Foxconn's main factory in China, which is located in Zhengzhou City, Henan Province.

The company asked its workers who had left the "closed circuit" "bubble" to return to work "as soon as possible".

Foxconn has thus ended the lockdown at its factory after 56 days, during which workers could only travel from their dormitories to their workplaces on designated buses.

About 200.000 people work in this factory and most of them live on the factory premises, in dormitories.

Since October, when an increase in its cases was observed covid-19, the factory was on lockdown.

At the end of November, hundreds of workers had demonstrated, expressing their anger at their living conditions in this "closed circuit" regime. Other workers fled the factory, which caused a labor shortage.

On Wednesday, China's health authorities announced a general relaxation of measures to deal with it covid-19, after angry protests broke out in several cities in the country, in the hope of recovering the world's second largest economy that was suffocating under the "zero covid" policy.

The problems caused by the lockdown in the operation of the Foxconn factory had serious effects on the supply chain, but also on the company itself.

In November, Foxconn's turnover fell by 11,4% year-on-year. The company had already announced that it had revised down its forecasts for the fourth quarter of the year. Some analysts estimated a drop in sales of up to 20%.

Source: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ