That’s a rate of production – not to mention sales – far in excess of any digital camera, but in the photo industry, too, the effect of the COVID-19 outbreak is being felt. The company’s Zhengdou facility is estimated to churn out up to 500,000 of them a day, 4 and the company sells about one hundred times that number in a good quarter. It makes sense that a major drop in production of iPhones would affect Apple’s bottom line. Effect of disruption in China on consumer digital imaging industry For context, that's more than double the entire population of the USA. 3 It is estimated that up to 760 million people in China are currently subject to some kind of travel restriction. Around five million jobs in China rely on Apple device manufacturing alone, and the company has already warned that it will miss revenue goals as a result of the outbreak. So when factories in China shut down, that creates a problem. ‘Chinese manufacturing’ encompasses everything from cars to smartphones, not to mention the myriad of tiny components that end up inside virtually all consumer electronic devices. 2Ī disruption to iPhone production in China was enough for Apple to issue warnings about revenue this quarter. And as a result of a loss of output caused by COVID-19, Chinese manufacturing fell at a record rate in February. In 2018, China accounted for about 16% of the global economy, and about 28% of global manufacturing output. Last month, as a result of COVID-19, Chinese manufacturing fell to a record lowīut first, to China – because China is important.
Recent record falls in stock markets all over the world are a clear indicator of what one analyst called an ‘economic pandemic’, 1which reflects a growing worry that markets could be badly hit by the consequences of what is now a global problem. The economic impact is here, and it’s very real. The medical risks of COVID-19 are still being assessed, and are beyond the scope of this article, but inevitably, much of COVID-19's impact so far has been economic. So why is a new illness – which has killed far fewer people than normal strains of flu in an average year – being taken so seriously? 'An economic pandemic' Local quarantines were put into place, but you know what happened next: COVID-19 has spread across the globe, with more than 87,000 confirmed cases as of Monday March 2nd, 2020. The disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 has since been given the official name COVID-19. In December 2019, doctors in Wuhan, China, started to identify cases of what looked like a new form of coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to severe acute respiratory illnesses such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV).