Our Bureau
New Delhi
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Apple wants to expand iPhone manufacturing in India within the next 2-3 years. The plan is to assemble nearly 25% of iPhones here each year.
Apple currently makes around 7% of iPhones it sells worldwide in India. The mission now seems to triple or quadruple that amount. Apple is now seeking to build a more resilient supply chain in which all its products are no longer made in one nation. The plan is to expand manufacturing in India to more than 50 million devices within the next few years.
Apple’s top suppliers, including Taiwan’s Foxconn, is set to open a new plant in the state of Karnataka in April, from where it plans to eventually manufacture 20 million smartphones annually—mostly iPhones.
Tata group, which already owns an iPhone manufacturing plant in the state of Karnataka, wants to build the country’s biggest iPhone assembly plant in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
The new Tata Group iPhone factory aims to be operational within 12-18 months. Once operational, this will be a huge factory hosting 20 assembly lines and employing 50,000 workers. Tata also makes iPhone enclosures at its factory in Hosur and plans to launch 100 Apple-focused retail stores in India.
The Journal’s report adds that India has been picked as the primary site to manufacture a new budget iPhone and Apple has begun working with local contractors to lay out a manufacturing plan for the product—something it previously only did in China.
At an event in January, India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal applauded Apple as “another success story” in India’s push to become a global manufacturing hub. At the time, Goyal also indicated that Apple wanted to bring 25% of its global manufacturing to India. The launch of the iPhone 15 this year was a key milestone for Apple’s India manufacturing plans as it was the first time that the latest iPhone model shipped globally from both Indian and Chinese factories at launch. Apple’s India expansion has been part of the so-called China+1 strategy adopted by various global companies.
