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.
