Slashdot Mirror
Mass Production of iPhones To Start In India
Apple is poised to begin mass production of iPhones in India this year, according to Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Terry Gou. This marks a big shift for the largest assembler of Apple's handsets that has long concentrated production in China. Bloomberg reports: Gou said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has invited him to India as his Taiwanese company plans its expansion in the country. Apple has had older phones produced at a plant in Bangalore for several years, but now will expand manufacturing to more recent models. Bloomberg News reported this month that Foxconn is ready to start trial production of the latest iPhones in the country before it starts full-scale assembly at its factory outside the southern city of Chennai.
India has become the fastest-growing smartphone market in the world, while China stagnates and Apple loses share to local competitors such as Huawei Technologies Co. and Xiaomi Corp. Apple has been a minor player in India, in part because of its high prices, but local manufacturing would help the Cupertino, California-based company avoid import duties of 20 percent. It's not yet clear how Apple's steps into India will affect its China operations. China has been the company's most important manufacturing base for years, home to Foxconn's biggest facilities and hundreds of other partners.
India has become the fastest-growing smartphone market in the world, while China stagnates and Apple loses share to local competitors such as Huawei Technologies Co. and Xiaomi Corp. Apple has been a minor player in India, in part because of its high prices, but local manufacturing would help the Cupertino, California-based company avoid import duties of 20 percent. It's not yet clear how Apple's steps into India will affect its China operations. China has been the company's most important manufacturing base for years, home to Foxconn's biggest facilities and hundreds of other partners.
A chinese friend recently complained to me that while life in china has gotten good, and wages not that far from what he was making when he was working in spain, so has the rent, cost of living etc and now manufacturers are picking up and moving to factories in India, the Philipines and Africa.
Welcome to the first world China. Might I suggest leaning on your government to get some sort of welfare thing going, now that you've made it, all the jobs are going bye bye.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
2/3 of China is below the poverty line
You can be forgiven for thinking that, because it was not that long ago what you say was true and you don't get a lot of news about China in the mainstream press.
But these days the poverty rate has been driven to 3.1 percent, because China has been working really hard to live the very poorest out of poverty.
Now China is of course known to cook some books, but even with that factored in they are far from having 2/3 of China below the poverty line these days.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley