In a bid to reduce its reliance on China as a base for operations, Apple could be planning to produce up to $40 billion worth of smartphones in India through contract manufacturers Wistron and Foxconn, reports The Indian Economic Times.
Several meetings between Apple's senior executives and top ranking government officials over the last few months have paved the way for the iPhone maker examining the possibility of shifting nearly a fifth of its production capacity from China to India and scaling up its local manufacturing revenues, through its contract manufacturers, to around $40 billion over the next five years, say officials familiar with the matter.
A senior government official told ET the decision is being linked to India's production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, which was introduced to boost local manufacturing of electrical products, particularly smartphones.
A company must manufacture at least $10 billion worth of mobile phones in a phased manner between 2020 and 2025 to benefit from the PLI scheme and are required to meet target on a yearly basis.
Currently, Apple sells $1.5 billion of phones in India, but less than $0.5 billion of those are locally manufactured. In contrast, in 2018-2019 Apple produced $220 billion worth of products in China.
According to ET, government officials are willing to look into concerns that Apple hs with the PLI scheme, including how it values plant and machinery already in use in China, and the extent of the business information required under the scheme.
WaltrWhit on May 11st, 2020 at 13:47 UTC »
The comments in here are wild. Apple is likely ‘actually’ diversifying away from China because of security and IP theft concerns.
In manufacturing the labor costs are not as big of a deal as you all think. It has a lot to do with the labor force availability though. And I’ve seen iPhone manufacturing. If you think robots in America can do what people in India can do for a cheaper price you lost your mind.
sime_vidas on May 11st, 2020 at 13:22 UTC »
Why hasn’t India been bigger in this regard? Most of the products seem to be made in China, but India has a huge population too, and its labor should be even cheaper, statistically speaking.
dayumbrah on May 11st, 2020 at 13:09 UTC »
Not that its much better ethically but at least taking some power from china, i guess