Troubled Foxconn India factory to reopen on Wednesday

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Foxconn India
Foxconn India (Image credit: Reuters)

What you need to know

  • Foxconn's Indian plant will reopen on Wednesday.
  • The Chennai factory has suffered from protests over food poisoning and worker conditions.
  • The factory has been closed since December 18.

Foxconn is getting ready to reopen its troubled Indian plant tomorrow according to a new report. The plan has been closed since December 18 following protests relating to food poisoning incidents and poor worker conditions.

Reuters reports that the plant will reopen but that it will continue to remain on probation with Apple as the company monitors conditions.

"Workers will start to return gradually as soon as we are certain our standards are being met in every dormitory and dining area," Apple said in a statement.Foxconn said: "We have implemented a range of corrective actions to ensure this cannot happen again and a rigorous monitoring system to ensure workers can raise any concerns they may have, including anonymously."

The Foxconn plant has been building iPhone 12 handsets and has been testing production of the newer iPhone 13 devices but the recent round of problems have taken attention away, and rightly so.

While Apple's supplier will reopen the plant tomorrow it will have no more than 100 people working on day one and it's thought that it could be more than two months before full production has been resumed. Neither Apple nor Foxconn was apparently willing to tell Reuters when production would restart at the factory.

Foxconn is Apple's main manufacturing partner and is responsible for assembling devices at multiple plants around the world. Its move to areas beyond China continues, partly at the behest of Apple, in an attempt to remove its reliance on the country.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.