Pegatron expected to land half of Apple’s iPhone 6 orders

pegatron

For it only being January, there sure has been a lot of information tossed about regarding the next-gen iPhone. Insiders claim to know what size the display will be, what kind of camera it’ll have, and even who is going to make it.

A new report out of Taiwan this afternoon is claiming that Pegatron will likely be tapped to manufacture half of Apple’s [so-called] iPhone 6 orders—a huge win for the Taiwanese supplier, who currently assembles the iPhone 5c…

Here’s the report from Taiwan’s Liberty Times (via MacRumors):

Taiwan’s Pegatron Corp, an assembler of Apple’s iPhone 5C, is expected to win half of the orders from the US tech giant for its next smartphone model, a report said on Thursday.

In order to meet the demand, Pegatron has started building a new plant at Kunshan, a satellite city nearShanghai where all its iPhones are assembled, the Liberty Times said without identifying its source.

The paper went on to say that the Kunshan plant will become operational in the middle of the year, and start ramping up its production in Q3. This suggests that the new iPhone will debut late this year, which has been the case since 2011.

Pegatron—and subsequently Apple—has come under heavy fire in recent months over ‘serious’ labor rights violations. The latest investigation came after a handful of factory workers died unexpectedly—one of which was just 15 years-old.

There’s no word yet on who is going to produce the other half of the iPhone 6 orders, but common sense points to Foxconn. Foxconn, a long-time Apple partner, has also encountered labor rights issues, and had problems making the iPhone 5.