Woo Hoo! Apple’s new iPhone is coming!
THE new iphone. It’s coming! Aren’t you excited too? I know I am because it’ll be just fabulous allowing me to pose even more effectively as a cool and in touch sort of person. You know, rather than the fat middle aged man I actually am.
The knowledge that the new iPhone is coming is revealed to us by the Wall Street Journal:
TAIPEI—Foxconn Technology Group has resumed hiring assembly-line workers in China after a postholiday freeze, in the latest sign that customer Apple Inc. is gearing up for production of a new iPhone.
Pretty cool reporting hunh? The factory that makes iPhones is now recruiting people again so therefore there must be a new iPhone coming.
They’re probably right but it’s not entirely certain. That hiring freeze caught everyone on the hop when it happened.
In China, these vast factories are populated by migrants from rural areas. At Chinese New Year everyone goes home to see Mum and Dad (it’s been called the largest migration in history and it happens every year). Traditionally, the migrants take this break as a chance to move to another factory. Or even, not to bother going back now they’ve made enough cash to build a house or open a shop etc. So, the weeks after the holiday are a vast hiring fair. Factories attempt to get back to having a full workforce.
This didn’t happen at Foxconn this year. So, everyone started to wonder whether apple’s sales were falling. But that wasn’t what had actually happe3ned. Foxconn raised wages significantly last year. Thus almost everyone did come back from their hols. Thus no hiring fair: not because they needed frewer people but because they’d raised wages beforehand.
So while the WSJ is probably right here, it’s not altogether a direct link between Foxconn hiring and Apple sales or new products.
Photo: In this Monday Sept. 24, 2012 mobile phone photo, windows of a Foxconn workers’ dormitory building are broken after a brawl in Taiyuan, capital of Northern China’s Shanxi province. The company that makes Apple’s iPhones suspended production at a factory in China on Monday after a brawl by as many as 2,000 employees at the nearby dormitory injured 40 people. The facility will reopen Tuesday.
Posted: 16th, April 2013 | In: Money, Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
