Coronavirus continues to impact the tech industry
Coronavirus has affected big companies’ ability to both acquire manufacturing materials, and deliver finished goods.
1. Samsung shuts down its factory in South Korea due to a coronavirus outbreak. While most of the factory reopened soon after, the floor on which the infected employee was found, remained closed a few days later. This brings to light the risks at play. Currently, supply chains are still intact, but the risk is there. The risk holds true for other companies as well. Ericsson, Apple, and Nokia.
2. Morgan Stanley, the investment banking company, was forced to stay home, but that hasn’t stopped the Hong Kong Summit. In light of the coronavirus outbreak and the risks involved in traveling, the 10th annual Hong Kong Summit will take place virtually instead of being scrapped like countless other international events and meetings like it.
3. Facebook has cancelled its annual F8 conference as a result of coronavirus concerns. Facebook has said that it planned to replace the in-person conference with events that were locally hosted and with videos and live-streamed content.
4. Microsoft has announced that it will not meet sales forecast for the upcoming quarter as a consequence of the impacts of the corona virus. The “uncertainty related to the public health situation in China” has negatively impacted Microsoft’s Windows and Surface hardware businesses, the company said.
5. The company behind the game ‘Fortnite’ is missing the biggest video game industry conference of the year because of the coronavirus outbreak. Epic Games, the company behind “Fortnite” and also, one of the world’s most popular game developers, will no longer be in attendance at the 2020 Game Developers Conference.
6. The wildly popular simulation game ‘Plague Inc’ was pulled from the iPhone’s Chinese app store amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis in China. The game’s maker says it doesn’t know why the game was pulled, and whether it was linked to the coronavirus outbreak.
7. Coronavirus fears prompt Chinese ride-hailing app DiDi to install protective sheets in vehicles and give masks to drivers. The outbreak that originated in Wuhan, China, has killed 2,012 people and infected more than 75,000 according to recent totals.
8. App downloads in China have skyrocketed as a result of the corona virus outbreak. The Financial Times reports that more than 222 million downloads were made in China through Apple’s online store in the week starting February 2.
9. PlayStation is skipping a major video-game conference because of ‘increasing concerns’ over the coronavirus outbreak. Sony’s PlayStation group canceled its plans to attend the first major video-game convention of the year, PAX East.