The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Foxconn closes iPad factory after explosion deaths

Investigation underway, Wall Street shrugs

Part of a Foxconn factory that produces Apple's iPad device has been closed, after three workers at the plant were killed in an explosion blamed on combustible dust in a duct last Friday.

According to Reuters, the manufacturer's parent company Hon Hai Precision said in a stock exchange filing that it had temporarily shut down its polishing workshops at its Chengdu, China factory while an investigation into the deaths takes place.

No information was given as to when the probe of the plant was expected to be completed. The explosion also injured 16 people at the factory, three of whom were said to be in a serious condition.

Meanwhile, shares in Apple rallied on Wall Street on Monday, after taking a temporary knock from reports about the explosion, with some worrying that the manufacture of Cupertino's popular iPad 2 slab could be affected by the blast.

The company's shares, which had fallen 1.7 per cent when Wall Street opened on Monday, are currently down 0.24 per cent on Nasdaq trading at $334.40. ®

Latest Comments

Hmmm

LOL @ compensation in china

just yesterday i was looking through Apple's forums on how to remove ITunes where it errored out while uninstalling, saying 'can't uninstall due to the .msi file being on a network resource that's unavailable'. What a crap piece of software.

And even when other users were saying 'i can't uninstall Itunes due to this error', Apple admins were saying 'uninstall it from add/remove programs'. :rolleyes:

Apple is dumb.

God help any apple employee, especially in china, cause god has a better chance of helping them than their employer

0
0

never mind eh....

I'm sure the families of those killed and injured will be devastated that you may need to wait a little longer for your shiny toy.

0
0

In other words

more iPad 2 delays :(

0
0
Anonymous Coward

That would be a first in China

So the answer is more likely, no.

But they did build the whole factory in 3 months or something crazy like that so I'm sure by the end of this week all holes will be patched up and things back to running again.

0
0

Kind of hard to operate when you have holes in the factory floor

According to ChengDu, SiChuan local media a friend relayed to me apart from the damaged explosion area there are holes/cracks in floors above the detonation point and there were concerns the floors might collapse.

What interests me more, are the employees going to get compensation for the lay off period?

0
0

More from The Register

 breaking news
Apple cored: Samsung sells 10 million Galaxy S4 in a month
Beware of South Koreans bearing Android
Microsoft reveals Xbox One, the console that can read your heartbeat
Upgrades Live service – and no always-on requirement
US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster
Beowulf cluster built for the price of a single PC
Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook
All roads lead to Chrome?
Euro PC shipments plummet into bottomless pit of DOOOOM
11th quarter of decline, 20pc drop on last year - Gartner
Fairphone goes on sale to all
The Android handset that's PC can be yours
Nintendo throws flaming legal barrel at YouTubing fans
All your walk-through vid revenue are belong to us

Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement

Our award-winning Regcasts have teamed up with training provider QA for the deepest of deep dives into Hyper-V, including a live demo.

Understand VM movement - just click to play, or go here for a bigger version.