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• Foxconn said impact of COVID-19 lockdowns has been better than it feared
• Taiwanese manufacturer paused its operations in Shenzhen after Beijing imposed lockdowns in several major cities
Apple Inc’s supplier (NASDAQ: AAPL), Foxconn, on Tuesday said the second half of 2022 is heading “in a better direction” as China’s COVID-19 lockdown appears to be easing.
“We are quite confident in the stability of our supply chain for the second half of this year,” Taiwan’s electronics contract manufacturer’s chairman Liu Young-way told the company’s annual shareholder meeting.
In late March, China ordered a series of COVID-19 lockdowns in some of its major cities after a renewed surge in coronavirus cases, forcing Foxconn to pause its operations in Shenzhen, a Chinese manufacturing hub where the company produces some iPhones, iPads and Macs for Apple.
“COVID is difficult to predict,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month on a conference call with analysts after reporting its fiscal second-quarter results, which spooked the investors.
The Cupertino giant also warned that fiscal third-quarter sales could be hurt by as much as $8 billion due to several challenges, including supply chain constraints.
Foxconn on Tuesday raised its outlook for the current quarter and the entire year and said that Beijing’s “zero-COVID” policy had only a limited impact on production as the company kept workers on-site in a “closed loop” system.
While the comments don’t necessarily mean Apple is totally in the clear from supply chain constraints, it suggests the situation is improving for iPhone manufacturing.
“The overall lockdown impact on Foxconn is rather limited,” Young-way said. “You can tell from our revenues in April and May’s performance is also better than we estimated.”
Picture Credit: Nation Thailand
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