SEOUL, March 9 (UPI) – Samsung Electronics has temporarily moved its smartphone production to Vietnam after the closure of its South Korean factory due to the new coronavirus, COVID-19.
The world’s largest smartphone maker said Monday it had closed and quarantined its factory in Gumi, about 200 km southeast of Seoul, over the weekend.
In recent weeks, six Samsung employees at Gumi have tested positive for COVID-19, prompting the tech giant to shut down its factory three times. Gumi is located just north of Daegu, the epicenter of the virus epidemic in South Korea.
As the disruption continued, the company opted to outsource production. Its Gumi factory mainly produced high-end products, notably the Galaxy S20 series, the Galaxy Note 10 and the Galaxy Z Flip.
Samsung operates two large smartphone factories in the provinces of Bac Ninh and Thai Nguyen in Vietnam, which account for about half of the company’s global production.
The company said its Gumi plant will take over high-end products when the virus is brought under control.
Samsung, which is also the world’s largest maker of memory chips, recently reported an employee infected with a virus at its semiconductor factory south of Seoul, but that did not affect chip production.
South Korea has seen hundreds of new COVID-19 infections a day, the largest cluster outside of China, where the epidemic started in December.
