Apple supplier Goertek has firmed up plans to move a substantial amount of production from China to Vietnam, after the Cupertino company urged it to do so. The company currently makes AirPods, and is also believed to have been lined up as a Vision Pro supplier.
The company said last year that it had been receiving almost daily queries about how quickly it could move production from China to Vietnam …
The company reported being pressured to make the move early last year.
A major AirPods supplier says that US client reps have been visiting the company on an almost daily basis to ask when it can move out of China. While Apple is not explicitly named, it is near-certain that it is one of the companies applying pressure […]
“Starting from last month, so many people from the client side are visiting us almost every day,” Deputy Chairman Kazuyoshi Yoshinaga said from his offices at GoerTek’s sprawling industrial complex north of Hanoi. The topic that dominates discussions: “When can you move out?”
South China Morning Post today reports that the company has now advised the Shenzhen Stock Exchange of its plans.
Goertek’s Vietnamese entity, which will manufacture consumer electronics products, from AirPods and smartwatches to virtual reality and augmented reality gear, is a project that will meet both the Chinese assembler’s future development plan and client demand, it said in the filing to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange […]
The Vietnamese subsidiary, which will be set up through its Hong Kong entity Goertek (Hong Kong) Co, is expected to be located in northern Bac Ninh province, which has attracted investment from a raft of South Korean firms including consumer electronics and semiconductor giant Samsung Electronics.
It’s not entirely clear how much progress has been made in the 11 months since the previous report. The $280M investment described in today’s report is the same figure cited by the company almost a year go. However, the fact that a stock exchange filing has been made does at least make things more definite.
While Goertek is currently known to make AirPods for Apple, there have been repeated reports that the company is set to become a major Vision Pro supplier.
We’ve been warning for many years about both the need and the difficulty of reducing Apple’s dependence on China, but the pandemic made even clearer the risks of the company having most of its manufacturing eggs in one basket. COVID-19-related disruption at the world’s biggest iPhone assembly plant was estimated to have cost the company a billion dollars per week.
Apple has been gradually diversifying its supply chain, with assembly plants in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere.
Photo by Akhil Yerabati on Unsplash
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