Global tech giant closes its service centers in Russia
The MacLabs service centers in Moscow and the B2X branch in St. Petersburg have already stopped working.
Authorized Apple service centers began to close in Russia. So at the moment, the MacLabs service centers in Moscow and the B2X branch in St. Petersburg have stopped working.
According to Izvestia, other Apple ASCs that do not belong to large companies or network retailers, such as Re: Store or M.Video, may close in the near future. The capital ASC “Brobrolab” announced a campaign to collect 6 million rubles to continue its activities.
The Apple Care+ extended warranty in Russia still works, but only for iPhone and Apple Watch – it does not apply to Mac and iPad.
Now Apple does not supply components to Russia directly, but distributes them to the ASC through a company located in one of the Baltic countries, which seriously increases the warranty repair period and the cost of post-warranty service.
iPhones.ru Editor-in-Chief Nikita Goryainov is confident that ASCs will continue to close. “A significant part of repairs and appeals has moved into the gray zone. The situation with spare parts is also unstable. Under such conditions, those ASCs that do not have other serious cash flows inevitably have to curtail part of their activities and shrink,” he said.
Goryainov added that in addition to this, the demand for ACS is falling, since “the fleet of Apple equipment in Russia, which remains under the official manufacturer’s warranty, is rapidly decreasing and will dry up to piece units in eight months.”
War in Ukraine and Apple
In January 2023, in Russia, Apple Pay was replaced with phone stickers.
On April 13, 2023, Apple stopped using tungsten, tantalum and gold from Russia in its products. The corporation complied with the requirements of the US government.
In 2021, the supply of tungsten concentrate from the Russian Federation to the United States accounted for about 3.5% of the market. If we consider in terms of money, then this is about $ 3.5 million. Sergei Grishunin, managing director of the Russian NRA rating service, believes that Apple could compensate for the cancellation of supplies from the Russian Federation with purchases in China.