By Coco Feng

Copyright scmp

Super Typhoon Ragasa disrupted production of Apple’s iPhones in Shenzhen and crucial pre-holiday shipments by cross-border e-commerce merchants, as the year’s strongest storm barrelled towards southern China with heavy rain and hurricane-force winds.
The world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, Foxconn Technology Group, on Tuesday suspended assembly work at its Shenzhen unit – the innovative Product Enclosure Business Group, responsible for high-speed connectors, memory and other mechanical parts of the iPhone – days after the newly launched iPhone 17 models started delivery last week.
Listed in Taiwan as Hon Hai Precision Industry, Foxconn announced via a subsidiary’s WeChat account that production would resume when the government announces that typhoon-related risks have eased.
Foxconn did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
The company’s production in Shenzhen, spread across two areas of the tech hub in southern Guangdong province, accounted for about 25 per cent of its total production capacity, according to Morgan Stanley data cited in a 2022 report by Taiwan’s Economic Daily News.
The typhoon’s impact extended beyond factory walls, as it disrupted vital transport and logistics arteries connecting global markets to mainland producers of goods sold online.

It would take three to five days to resume cross-border merchants’ shipment of goods for the Black Friday shopping season in the US this November, according to Gardenia Zhao, assistant to the general manager of DLX Global Logistics.
Several merchants who run stores on major online shopping sites, such as Amazon.com and PDD Holdings-owned Temu, said their shipments were paused owing to the inclement weather.
Popular Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Shopee, owned by Singapore-based Sea, stopped accepting goods at its warehouses in Dongguan and Hong Kong at around noon on Tuesday, according to ENmedia, an e-commerce marketing agency.
Amazon, Temu and Sea did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
Echoing Zhao’s assessment, the co-founder and partner of Shanghai-based Pilotage Consulting, Tian Yong, estimated the shipping delays would last up to three days.
China’s major on-demand delivery platforms – Meituan, JD.com and Alibaba Group Holding’s Ele.me and Taobao Shangou – on Tuesday also suspended operations in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, because of the typhoon. Alibaba owns the Post.
Ride-hailing services Didi Chuxing and Alibaba’s Amap also stopped taking orders in southern coastal cities including Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai.