Workers at a production workshop of Foxconn's technology park in Zhengzhou, Central China's Henan Province on July 24, 2021. The park is a major global smartphone manufacturing base. Photo: VCG

The Zhengzhou plants of Apple's original design manufacturer (ODM) Foxconn in Central China's Henan Province just announced the new round of recruitment expansion for an extra 200,000 workers with historically high bonuses in what could be its largest ever recruitment since the epidemic just weeks before the new iPhone series launch in September.

It comes as Wang Xue, a deputy general manager of Foxconn plants in Zhengzhou, said in a recent media interview that they need new workers in order to meet the production needs before the end of September, a statement which was confirmed by Foxconn when reached by the Global Times on Friday.

The Zhengzhou factory can accommodate up to 350,000 assembly workers and can produce up to 500,000 smart phones per day, according to media reports.

While the company is continuing its mass recruitment since April, they are still battling labor shortages, a phenomenon not only in the plants in Zhengzhou but elsewhere including those in South China's Shenzhen and Southwest China's Chengdu. The production lines for iPhone 13 particularly need more workers.

"We were told to recruit around 5,000 new workers on a weekly-basis, but it's difficult to fully meet this target at the moment," a manager with the plant in Shenzhen said on Friday.

In order to draw more workers, Foxconn plants are raising one-time bonuses for new candidates from around 9,800 yuan ($1,511) in July to over 10,000 at present if they work for up to 90 days, another hiring manager in Zhengzhou told the Global Times.

While summertime has always been its peak period for recruitment for Apple's ODM factories in a year, especially ahead of the new launch, this year's situation has been exacerbated, due to the epidemic fallout that has caused raising labor and raw material costs, combined with the global chip shortage and supply chain disruption in Vietnam, Ma Jihua, a veteran industry analyst, told the Global Times on Friday.

Meanwhile, the US crackdown on Huawei, the major and probably the only capable competitor of Apple, has risen up the market expectation and demand for Phone 13, making it possible for the new products to break market record on sales in China, the expert said.

"But given the rising costs and the lack of competitors, the potential market price for iPhone 13 could be up by at least 10 percent," Ma predicted.