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."

Comments

Re:Apple to start making fake news

[Anonymous Coward]

An alternative fact is that Apple is making all of its products in the USA and creating thousands of jobs. GO TRUMP!

skeptical

[supernova87a]

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.

Re:skeptical

[alvinrod]

It doesn't matter if it costs more, that's already an accepted fact. What matters is that he increased cost is still less than the additional cost they incur manufacturing elsewhere. With China right next door, India will never be a major manufacturing center for electronics, but if supplying the market in India (as small or large as it may be) allows Apple to generate more profit, they'll make the move. This is Cook's area of expertise, so I suspect that if Apple moves forward with these plans that they've figured out how to make money with this arrangement or expect the market in India to grow enough to compensate for the added manufacturing costs.

Re:skeptical

[monkeyxpress]

India is not going to be making the display, battery or silicon. At best they might be assembling the boards there, building the case parts, and assembling the final product. My guess would be Apple will be leaning heavily on the India govt to ensure they are only doing that final bit.

In any case, the critical parts of all those components are heavily automated. Board assembly is pretty much completely automated these days. Most of the case machining is automated (I think they still run drill & tap machining centres with operators manually loading, but they may have moved to 5-axis by now). The biggest issue is probably on final assembly, but I can't imagine Apple has not been working with Foxconn on automating much of that by now as well, given the rising labour costs in China and situations like India, Brazil and now Trump. It isn't hard, there just wasn't any reason to bother before.

If you visit a modern electronics contract manufacturer, most of it is people in anti-static coats loading up parts into part feeders. There is very little hand labour left, unless you are talking very low volume.

The most annoying thing for Apple is that they had to bother doing this, when there was a perfectly good robot factory in China that could supply the stuff.