TAIPEI – Foxconn has signed a $62.5 million lease with Saigon-Bac Giang Industrial Park Corp in Vietnam to build a new manufacturing facility.

The move to secure a new manufacturing site comes after the Apple supplier's iPhone plant in Zhengzhou, China, saw an exodus of tens of thousands of employees and violent worker protests amid stringent pandemic control measures imposed during a Covid-19 outbreak that began in late October.

In Apple's quarterly earnings call earlier this month, CEO Tim Cook said the Covid-19 challenges "significantly impacted the supply of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max and lasted through most of December."

The Vietnamese site, located in the Bac Giang province east of Hanoi, was rented through Foxconn’s subsidiary Fulian Precision Technology Component Co. The lease will run through February 2057, the company said.

Foxconn previously announced that it will relocate some of its MacBook production to Vietnam, and has also announced plans to quadruple the workforce at its iPhone plant in India over the next two years.