Apple asks its assemblers to move production of some AirPods and Beats headphones to India for the first time, Nikkei Asia reported Wednesday, in what appears to be another victory for India’s push for local production.
Cheng Ting-Fang for Nikkei Asia:
The move is part of Apple’s gradual diversification from China, as it aims to reduce the risk of supply chain disruptions stemming from the country’s strict zero-COVID policy and tensions with the United States.
Apple has spoken to a number of its suppliers about increasing production in India, including major hearing devices, as early as next year, three people familiar with the matter said. Nikkei Asia. In response, iPhone assembler Foxconn is preparing to produce Beats headphones in the country and hopes to produce AirPods there as well, said two people with first-hand knowledge of the matter …
Bringing production of AirPods and Beats to India would expand Apple’s manufacturing footprint in the country, following a recent announcement that the latest iPhone has already been manufactured there … While manufacturing in India was initially aimed at serving the huge local market, Apple is now developing the country as a strategic manufacturing base, with exports destined for markets like Europe, informed sources on the matter say.
Joey Yen, a technology analyst at IDC, said Nikkei Asia that … “China’s ongoing anti-Covid-zero policies are also pushing tech companies to seek alternatives and India may have an opportunity to grow in the long term …”
MacDailyNews takes: Diversify, diversify, diversify!
Note to the CCP: “Zero-COVID” is a pipe dream.
As we wrote almost a year ago:
In general, human-transmissible coronaviruses do not go away. There is no such thing as zero-COVID.
COVID-19 is here to stay. It will most likely become endemic, but over time it will pose less of a danger. People will gain immunity via vaccines (TDB efficacy) and of course while contracting and recovering from variants such as omicron as partially effective vaccines allow for not only transmissibility but also breakthrough infections.
The flu and the four human coronaviruses that cause the common cold (OC43, 229E, NL63 and HKU1) are, of course, also endemic, but a combination of annual flu shots and acquired immunity means that healthy societies tolerate the inevitable seasonal deaths and diseases that lead without requiring lockdowns, masks, social distancing, indefinite delays for returning to work, etc.
At that point, if anything, some people will decide that wasting their short lives in terrible fear of a bad flu, most likely designed by China and partially funded by the US National Institutes of Health, is a self-destructive hysterical overreaction?
The real virus is panic. – MacDailyNews, March 9, 2020
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