Chinese Tech Companies Building Factories In India

jfruh writes: Over the past two decades, China's relatively high skill, low cost workforce made the country a powerhouse of tech and electronics manufacturing. But in a sign that things might be changing, several large Chinese companies, including Foxconn and Huawei, are investing billions to start manufacturing in India. Xiaomi is expected to announce its first India-made phone today, as well. The article says that Foxconn's planned factory in Maharashtra "would create employment for at least 50,000 people, state chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said after the signing of the agreement at which Foxconn CEO Terry Gou was present."

Comments

Re:Africa after That?

[rmdingler]

Cheap labor remains an important consideration when moving manufacturing facilities.

But. Africa. Regional political unrest can undermine labor costs, raw material availability, and friendly tax packages.

For the next industrial emigration, manufacturers are going to want cheap and easy.

It might work out

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Indian manufacturing sector is perpetually troubled by labor union activism. Two states in India (Kerala and West Bengal) have been electing communists to power for decades. In fact these governments are probably the only ones in the whole world where the Communists have taken power by democratic elections and held on to them by elections.

The labor is extremely powerful in factories. One simple personal anecdote, a worker was drilling holes in the wind tunnel model for me to mount the sensors. Did a 9.9 mm hole, and had mounted the 10mm reamer bit in the machine. He had one hole to finish when the siren sounded for tea time, he walked off! I was standing by him and asked him to just finish the last hole, (move the handle once down like in a slot machine, that was all that was pending) he was upset by that request, and refused to finish that job for three weeks. No other worker would touch the machine, other drilling jobs were piling up. I was a very fresh rookie at that time. I did not even had the perception to understand he was waiting for me to apologize for the affront. I would have readily done it if I had known it. No one clued me in on it too. They were all having fun watching me running from pillar to post to get the model to the four-foot tunnel. No one dared to order a worker to finish the job.

There are other stories of workers deliberately opening the autoclave some 24 hours into the cycle, corrupting the tempering process of all the pieces inside. They were aircraft parts, all of them had to be scrapped. Loss of almost a million rupees. A foreman was injured in a shop floor. Ambulance could not reach the location. They had a battery truck. But the workers would not let it be used to transport the guy. Why? foremen belong to the "management"! It is that bad there.

But almost all the unions are controlled by the communists, and China being nominally communist, they may be able to sway the leadership. Also communist party leaders in India have a reputation of being above bribery etc. But the reality was that USSR would give their children scholarships to study in Soviet universities and use their publication (Mir publications, New Century Bookhouse etc) arms to pay them for books that never sell. My cousins have audited the inventory of millions of unsold books being eaten by moths in warehouses.

So given the money China has and the nominal communist government it has, it could bribe the union leaders the way USSR did. It could have factories with much less labor trouble.

So it could work out for China the way it would never work out for USA or European companies.