Once a railway town, Zhengzhou now busy air hub thanks to ‘Applemania’
Workers in Zhengzhou in central China have been busy since the start of September loading trucks and planes with the new Apple iPhone 6, and the whole city is expecting a boom from another wave of “Applemania”.
While Apple chief executive Tim Cook stood at the epicentre of the tech world in Cupertino, California with the iPhone 6 product launch on Tuesday, 10,000km away in Zhengzhou in central China, workers have been busy since the start of September loading trucks and planes with the new smartphone, and the whole city is expecting a boom from another wave of “Applemania”.
Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, is where Apple’s contract manufacturing giant Foxconn produced 96.45 million iPhones last year, or two-thirds of the total number sold worldwide that year. The arrival of Foxconn to the city in late 2010 has led to the take-off of an aviation economy in Zhengzhou that was previously known as Asia’s largest railway junction.
“I heard Foxconn has added thousands of new workers to the assembly line for the new iPhone,” said Huang Qing, deputy director of the management committee of the pilot Zhengzhou Airport Economic Zone, where Foxconn’s factory is located.
Foxconn, which could not be reached for comment, employs 200,000 people in the zone and single-handedly contributed 60 per cent of Henan province’s import-export value with its industrial output value of 180 billion yuan (HK$226.5 billion) last year, according to Huang.
Zhengzhou has become the preferred port by the market
Zhengzhou has long been the most important transport hub in central China, located at the intersection of the country’s north-south and east-west trunk rail routes. Seven million people are within reach of a two-hour high-speed train ride and two thirds of China is within a 1.5-hour flight radius.