Apple In Talks With India To Manufacture Locally (reuters.com)

Apple is in talks with India's government to explore making products locally, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, as the U.S. firm aims to make deeper inroads in the world's second-largest mobile phone market by users. From a report: India Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to boost technology manufacturing in the country through his 'Make in India' initiative. His government in June exempted foreign retailers for three years from a requirement to locally source 30 percent of goods sold in their stores. The Journal said Apple, in a letter to the federal government in November, outlined manufacturing plans and asked for financial incentives.

Comments

They don't want to lose a potential market

[ErichTheRed]

A lot of people might not know that India has a very protectionist policy regarding manufactured goods. It's very difficult to get items into the country from outside if there's any chance they will be used to conduct business. The company I work for is currently engaged in a love affair with India and Brazil for offshore development. Some of the stuff they're writing requires local access to hardware they can't just buy off the shelf from a distributor...there are only a few manufacturers out there and they're not making it in India. Getting anything into both of these countries that wasn't made there doesn't just involve paying a duty -- there's a byzantine maze of regulations, forms, local officials to pay, special assessments, personal visits to Government Agency X for stamps and signatures, etc. Last time this happened it took 4 months to ship the offshore company hardware -- and that's with our company having connections in the form of logistics specialists who know what actually needs to happen.

Apple just doesn't want to lose a potential market of over a billion people. They'd rather take the short term "loss" manufacturing at slightly above slave labor rates to ensure their products can be sold domestically. This is also happening to a lesser extent in Brazil, for the same reasons.

It's very ironic that a country whose major export seems to be IT "services" to the US and Europe has such a protectionist policy regarding manufacturing. Maybe they see what's happening in their customers' countries and don't want to have a rebellion on their hands when wages start going up inside their country. Personally, I'm for protectionism. It's a balance against the power of companies. Growing up in the Rust Belt and watching whole cities get hollowed out as companies chased cheap Southern, then foreign labor, was not fun. I seriously doubt Trump is going to follow through on his tariffs and protectionist platform...his buddies are going to demand that he put a stop to it, and they have more power than the working class types who helped vote him in.

Re:Imagine if Trump announced that

[bluefoxlucid]

Trade is beneficial. Trade lowers prices and increases wealth. Moving the manufacture of goods which have been offshored back to America would mean that those very factory workers would work longer hours to buy the same goods they're making. Above a certain factory worker wage, there would be fewer factory workers than lost American jobs; below a certain factory worker wage, we'd come up short, and so create American jobs to fill.

So, we're talking about destroying American jobs and making all Americans poorer, or about creating a few American jobs and also making all Americans poorer.

...yeah, we should continue to strategically offshore work that's cheaper to offshore, slowly, at a rate that doesn't shock our economy with sudden spikes in unemployment. Obviously our economy tanks if we go 30% unemployed overnight; whereas if we lose 0.1% per month to trade, we end up rich enough to offset it, creating more American jobs by the time the next year's layoffs come, thus ending up with lower unemployment and a wealthier middle- and lower-class.