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Apple To Start Making iPhones In India, Says State Government (bbc.co.uk)
vasanth quotes a report from BBC: Apple is to start making iPhones in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, the state's government has said. Ministers said Apple would start an initial manufacturing operation in the state, whose capital is the tech hub Bangalore, in April. The tech giant has a 2% share of India's mobile phone market, well behind South Korean rival Samsung. Apple has yet to officially confirm the plan, saying only that it is keen to "invest significantly" in India. But Priyank Kharge, minister of information technology and biotechnology in Karnataka, told the AFP news agency: "We have an understanding with Apple and we expect them to start manufacturing in Karnataka by the end of April." Reports said the plant is being set up by Taiwanese manufacturing company Wistron Corp. Apple has held a series of meetings with government representatives at both state and national level and is understood to be pressing for concessions before going ahead with such a move. Apple is currently unable to set up its own branded stores in India, which has a raft of rules to curb the activities of foreign companies. For it to be able to sell direct to customers in India, Apple would have to source 30% of the components of its products locally. Priyank Kharge, IT minister for the Indian state of Karnataka, said Thursday on Twitter: "Apple's intentions to make iPhones in Bengaluru will foster cutting-edge technology ecosystem [and] supply chain development in the state."
Just like its fake products
This is your FORMAL WARNING apple. Sad!
"And by getting Apple to set up in Karnataka, he hopes says it should help promote to region's ambition to become a location for high-end manufacturing." http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...
Still wrong continent!
It's time to make that shiny shit in USA... or fuck off for good!
If the average Indian could afford the iPhone, it would already have a high market share. They already grey-market import cheap chinese phones in their price range. Blaming import restrictions for low sales is misdirection.
"For it to be able to sell direct to customers in India, Apple would have to source 30% of the components of its products locally."
That's a great idea.
I found the filing for the special exclusion zone in the Indian federal permits db. Apple is essentially getting a deal where their land is India and not India. They don't have to pay tariffs moving things in and out (supplies / finished phones), nor do they have to pass things through customs. It's like a little Applestan on Indian soil.
Interesting thing I noted was that the number of workers listed is way less than what they have in china. Not sure if they plan a transition, keeping ops in both places, or if automation will play a part.
I do not believe Apple will find it cost effective or find it tolerable to build phones in India to the same quality as it is used to. Now, of course they will have done their own extensive analysis, but I imagine the following issues in plenty (even just supplying phones to the domestic Indian market):
- unreliable electric power (could be mitigated with huge backup generators)
- unreliable / poor quality road transport
- much less extensive or linked supply chain
- related to this, lower general quality of contributing required parts
- manufacturing and trade zone subsidies less transparent, more bribery
- more political interference at all levels of government interaction - simply refer back to the requirements to sell in India to begin with
I predict, and I would love to be shown wrong, that Apple will find this environment to be frustrating to no end. There are reasons that major electronic hardware manufacturers do not have world leading operations out of India.
Especially slave labor that takes all of their potential human earning value for a brand new shiny
Finally iPhones will support Engrish. About time shall I say. https://www.buzzfeed.com/tasne...
They have no trouble raising US$10 billion in a bond issue though. So we take American money and hide it overseas, and we give the jobs to India. Go globalism. Has anyone even bothered to work out what happens when no one can earn money in the US anymore (the current situation - most of that borrowed $10 billion is someone else's debt anyway). Who is going to buy their products? It's not rice or wheat they are selling, it's a high end item. At some point America runs out of disposable income. Again.
for them, it's just exploiting your cheap labor for massive profits, and they get to eventually take a larger share of your market. They are the only winners, that's why they go to you and China for manufacturing.
All it takes is one employee forgetting to wash their hands after taking a crap in the street, and you've got yourself a new color iPhone... indo-brown [tm]
By 30% of the product, they mean 30% of the value of the components.This is a breakdown of the cost for each component in the IPhone 5. http://www.digitaltrends.com/m...
......in their designated shitting streets.
of a quote by author, Neal Stephenson, from his seminal sci-fi/cyberpunk book, Snow Crash :
“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
If inefficiencies add X% to manufacturing costs but import tariffs would be X+5% would it not be worth it? As long as Apple does not have to heavily invest in plant, property and equipment or can recoup such costs fairly quickly.
This is highly doubtful.
Given the huge amount of money India extorted out of Microsoft after Microsoft bought Nokia, "Oh, we found a bunch of taxes you didn't pay...", anyone with deep pockets, like Apple, would have to be incredibly stupid to manufacture phones in India.
Not making, but assembling. So no tech is imported but used assembly machines. The local government is as dumb as a villager.
The most surprising about this is that Apple are apparently going to manufacture iPhones themselves, while in the past 15 years they have outsourced production of everything they sell. Apple didn't consider manufacturing as part of its core business. It's interesting that they are reconsidering that position.
and even that's not true. Rap is not music. Movies yeah. Software nope, spyware yes. Pizza delivery? wat...
ipoo in the loo, pajeet
There was an article in the NYT in Jan 2012 where some Apple exec mentioned they couldn't move jobs back to the US because the whole supply chain was in China. So how do they now figure to open up a factory in India?