APPLE Inc.’s iPhone shipments to China plunged more than 60 percent in February, when the COVID-19 virus outbreak shut down scores of its stores and hampered key manufacturing partners across its largest international market.

Shipments of Apple’s marquee device dropped to about 494,600 units from a year earlier, according to calculations based on monthly data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a government think-tank.

Overall mobile phone shipments, including Android devices, slid 56 percent to 6.4 million units in China, the academy said. Those year-earlier comparisons were skewed by the fact that the Lunar New Year holidays fell in February of 2019, versus January this year.

Since erupting in China in January, the COVID-19 epidemic has hit Apple’s supply and demand. Factories resumed work slower than expected and most of its 42 stores lay dormant for weeks, driving home Apple’s exposure to disruptions in the world’s No. 2 economy.

While factories are gradually restarting after enforced quarantine, lingering production bottlenecks risk hurting global iPhone revenue in coming months.

Apple has seen a “doomsday type” decline in iPhone sales out of China as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, though the impact should be short-lived, Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives wrote.

But if the outbreak persists into the second quarter, it threatens to hold up the launch of Apple’s fifth-generation capable or 5G iPhones, expected toward the latter half of 2020, UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri wrote. (SD-Agencies)