Samsung has received a multi-million dollar investment from the South Korean government to develop factory robots to help win manufacturing work currently being lost to cheap human labor in China.
Leading iPhone manufacturer Foxconn has failed to secure a stake in a Taiwanese chip company with the potential to earn massive amounts of cash from Apple.
Foxconn had made a bid for a share in Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL), offering a share swap which would have made it the largest shareholder in the company.
Unfortunately for Foxconn, the proposal was shot down by SPIL’s board of directors on Thursday, who argued that Foxconn, “fails to make a compelling case regarding necessity of the share swap.”
Stop the presses: supply chain companies really, really want Apple’s business.
According to a new report, key Apple manufacturers Foxconn and Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) are currently battling over control of a third company, Siliconware Precision Industries, a.k.a. SPIL. Why? Because it will help them win more orders from Apple, of course.
iPhone 6s manufacturer Foxconn has posted revenues of $318.4 million for the month of September, largely as a result of Apple’s next-gen handset.
The monster earnings for the month were not only the best month of Foxconn’s year so far, but represented a 30 percent rise from the previous month and an increase of 17.8 percent year-on-year.
And Apple’s main manufacturer is expecting October to be even better!
Apple supplier Foxconn is reportedly cutting costs and widening its margins to keep ahead of the pack as the Chinese smartphone market slows, according to a new report.
China’s surprise devaluation of the yuan is likely to have a massive impact on Apple and its suppliers.
China devalued its currency in an attempt to boost a flagging economy — resulting in the country’s biggest one-day loss in 20 years.
And while some will be celebrating, others (likely including Tim Cook) can’t be too happy about it!
Apple supplier Foxconn has come under fire over the last few years for its factories’ working conditions in China, but the company is now making plans to open up a new Apple plant in one of the world’s other booming nations: India.
The India government has previously blocked Apple from opening any brick-and-mortar retail outlets in the country because Apple don’t manufacture any products in India.
That could be about to change, however, thanks to a recent rumor claiming that Foxconn has been given permission to open new iPhone-manufacturing plants in Maharashtra, the heavily-populated state in the country’s western region which claims Mumbai as its capital.
The factories would benefit from government funding aimed at bringing more manufacturing companies to India.
Foxconn’s CEO Terry Gou is no fan of Samsung. In fact, according to a new report, he’s been trying to use his influence as Apple’s biggest manufacturing partner to get Apple to lessen its dependency on Samsung — while a giving a shot to other companies.
The reason? He thinks Taiwanese manufacturers need to work together to overcome the growing threat of the South Korean tech giant, which could potentially swallow all of their jobs.
Looking for more evidence that China is set to take over from the U.S. as Apple’s biggest market?
According to a report from the Chinese-language news outlet Tencent, Foxconn is currently buying 50,000-60,000 second-hand iPhones per day through worldwide channels, and then selling these on to the Chinese market.
Roughly 80 percent of the iPhones are said to sell through stores in Hong Kong.
Up until now, the majority of iPhones have been built in China, but long-time Apple manufacturer Foxconn could be setting its sights on a new developing market: India.
According to the Economic Times, the Foxconn Technology Group is set to pour money into three new facilities in India — based in the country’s Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh provinces — with a view to building iPhones for its biggest client.
Having been the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning reports and BBC documentaries, the questionable standards of conditions at Apple supplier Foxconn’s factories has made the company notorious, while its work building iPhones has made it rich.
But a new tour of the company’s sprawling Shenzhen factory — where the company makes iPads and Macs among other products — is eager to paint a very different picture: one of changing company, more like a university campus, with plenty of educational opportunities, and suicide stats below that of the U.S.
Apple’s doing everything it can to push its brand in China, which Tim Cook is convinced will soon take over from the U.S. as the company’s primary market.
Having recently taken the top spot for smartphone sales in the country for the first time ever, and also beaten out the likes of Gucci and Chanel to be named China’s favorite luxury brand, Apple is now teaming with manufacturer Foxconn to introduce a trade-in program for iPhones — letting customers exchange their older iPhone handsets for credit against other Apple products.
The program is set to go into action next week, on March 31.
A Chinese workers’ rights group released a new report today that sheds light on the deplorable working conditions in factories that assemble the iPhone 6. According to China Labor Watch, on February 3, 2015, Pegatron assembly line worker Tian Fulei died while assembling the iPhone 6.
The hospital labeled the cause of death as “sudden death,” but fellow workers say Tian worked long overtime shifts day after day, which gave his family reason to believe that Tian died from overwork.
To smooth things over, Pegatron reportedly offered the family a measly $2,400 as compensation for their son’s death. Tian’s family of farmers couldn’t afford to pay for an expensive independent autopsy to prove the death was work-related. Eventually they took Pegatron’s next offer of $1,277 for his untimely death.
The Rumor: Your iMacs and MacBooks will be powered by ARM processors in 1 - 2 years/
The Verdict Not likely to happen yet. Ming Chi Kuo, aka “the world’s most accurate Apple analyst” has been wrong a time or two, and I think this is time he’s way off. Ditching Intel chips has been rumored forever. It still doesn’t make sense, as Apple would be sacrificing a lot of processing power for modest battery gains. It could happen in the next five years, but Kuo’s prediction that we’ll see an ARM powered MacBook in the next year sounds too soon to be true.
Foxconn’s new $2.6 billion factory dedicated to building displays exclusively for Apple will supply OLED panels for future iPhones and wearables, according to a report from leading Japanese newspaper Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun.
Long-time Apple manufacturer Foxconn is supposedly working with touch panel company InnoLux to put together an ecosystem, allowing it to produce sixth-gen low temperature poly-silicon films, aimed at entering mass production in 2016.
Tim Cook has told Apple employees he’s “deeply offended” by the BBC’s critical documentary Apple’s Broken Promises that investigated working conditions inside Apple’s supply Asian supply chain.
In an email obtained by The Telegraph from Apple VP Jeff Williams to the company’s workers in the UK, Williams said he and Cook are offended by the BBC’s suggestion that Apple broke promises with workers in the supply chain, and that no other company is doing “as much as Apple does to ensure fair and safe working conditions.”
Williams also countered the BBC’s claims that Apple uses tin sourced through child labor in Indonesia, saying Apple is spearheading the movement to hold the tens of thousands of artisanal miners more accountable, rather than getting out of the country altogether.
The minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China got a sneak peek at the Apple Watch during a recent visit to Apple’s Cupertino headquarters. Photos published by a state-owned website show Apple CEO Tim Cook demonstrating the device to Lu Wei, who also stopped by Facebook’s campus to meet Mark Zuckerberg.
Foxconn has been working to replace its human workforce with robotic “Foxbots” for some time now, but it seems that a 2011 promise by CEO Terry Gou to unleash an army of production robots by the end of 2014 won’t be coming true after all.
According to the Chinese financial publication Jiemian, Foxconn is facing numerous difficulties building robots capable enough to carry out the kind of precision needed for constructing Apple devices. First and foremost is the fact that the bots are simply too clunky to do the work required of them — primarily because they were designed for automotive work rather than for assembling iPhones.
The current crop of bots reportedly have a production accuracy of 0.05mm, making them a little shy of the 0.02mm accuracy needed to build Apple products.
Depending on whether or not you can fulfil what is asked of you, being an Apple supplier sounds like it’s either the best or worst experience imaginable.
In the wake of the crashing and burning of Apple’s former sapphire supplier GT Advanced Technologies, some of Cupertino’s other contractors have pitched in with their take; filling the Wall Street Journal in on a few of the lessons they’ve learned along their roller coaster rides with Apple.
The two biggest take-homes? Don’t make promises you can’t keep, and don’t rely too much on Cupertino.
According to a new report from Bloomberg, Foxconn is set to spend $2.6 billion building a new factory in Taiwan exclusively to create displays for Apple.
Equipment installation for the factory is likely to begin next month, with the aim of starting mass production of panels by the end of 2015. The factory will require hiring an addition workforce of 2,300 people, and is going to be built at Innolux’s Kaohsiung Science Park campus in Southern Taiwan.
Foxconn currently has factories in China dedicated to assembling iPhones and iPads, but this will be the company’s first designed entirely with the goal of producing Apple components to go inside the devices.
Apple manufacturer Pegatron is having to expand its production capacity to deal with the epic demand being heaped on it due to the success of the iPhone 6, according to a new report.
Earlier today, Pegatron CEO Jason Cheng told investors that his company has spent upwards of $200 million in 2014 in capital expenditure to help ramp up production, and that this figure is going to increase to a massive $300 million next year.
Although a slowdown in notebook demand meant that Pegatron’s overall revenue is down 6.8% versus the same quarter in 2013, revenue from the company’s communications products (which includes the iPhone 6) grew 10% year on year. Net profit meanwhile leaped an astonishing 92% in the July-to-September period.
For those keeping track at home, this is the same time Pegatron began shipping the iPhone 6.
Tim Cook wasn’t kidding when he said that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were proving to be Apple’s most popular iPhones of all time.
Two new reports coming out of Apple’s Chinese supply chain today demonstrate the extent to which this is true. According to one report, Apple’s Chinese production line is on course to ship a total of 50 million iPhone 6 devices by the end of 2014 — referring only to the 4.-inch iPhone 6 and not including the 6 Plus.
By comparison, for the calendar fourth quarter of 2013, Apple sold a total of 51 million iPhones all-in, which itself marked an all-time quarterly record.
Massive demand for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus may have resulted in Apple’s eagerly anticipated 12.9-inch Retina iPad being pushed back to 2015, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. This chimes with August reports from Bloomberg claiming that the mythical iPad Maxi would arrive by early next year.
Apple reportedly planned to produce the larger iPad in mass volume starting in December, but had to put that idea on hold so its supply chain can fulfill iPhone 6 orders — particularly for the iPhone 6 Plus, which has proven more popular than even Apple expected.
Apple’s 5.5-inch “phablet” iPhone 6 Plus may still be in short supply, but according to supply chain sources it’s likely to wind up accounting for a whopping 60% of total iPhone 6 family shipments.
Prior to the iPhone 6 Plus’ official announcement, analysts were predicting the plus-sized iPhone 6 would make up a tiny fraction of the sales of its smaller sibling. Taiwan’s Topology Research Institute predicted that of the 80 million iPhone 6 family units it forecast would sell by the end of 2014, the iPhone 6 would account for 70 million, while the 6 Plus would sell only between 8 and 10 million units during that same timeframe.
