iPhone shipments in China rebound in March as manufacturing picks up pace

Shipments jumped 19 per cent in March from a year earlier to 2.5 million units

iPhone shipments in China have rebounded in March as manufacturing picks up pace. Reuters

Apple's iPhone shipments in China rebounded in March as the world's second-largest economy worked to reboot its manufacturing industry after the disruption caused by the coronavirus outbreak.

Shipments of Apple's flagship device jumped 19 per cent in March from a year earlier to 2.5 million units, according to Bloomberg calculations based on monthly data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a government think tank.

The broader smartphone market, including Android devices, shrunk by about 22 per cent to 21 million shipments, the academy said.

In February, the month most affected by government restriction measures designed to curb the spread of the virus, iPhone shipments plunged more than 60 per cent year on year as factories remained shut past the Lunar New Year holiday break.

Apple’s assembly plants in China – run mainly by Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn – slowly resumed operations through that month and into March.

At the mega-complex in Zhengzhou, known as “iPhone City”, more than 200,000 workers had returned to production lines as of late March, according to the local authority’s website.

The factory shipped almost 300,000 iPhone units per day at that point, a similar output to its pre-coronavirus capacity, the authority said.

Apple is preparing a redesign of its top-tier iPhones, borrowing cues from the latest iPads, as part of a major autumn refresh when 5G will be added to as many as four new handset models and the release of two key new accessories.

Some of the new iPhones could be released several weeks later than normal because of the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Bloomberg reported earlier.