Apple To Make In India

Smartphone manufacturing is all set to get a major boost in India with the tech behemoth Apple planning to shift a part of its global manufacturing to India from China. According to a report published, top executives at Apple have had a meeting with government officials and are discussing the possibility of setting up local manufacturing in India and carrying out operations through contract manufacturers. The company plans to scale up the local revenue to $40 billion in the next five years.

As a move to encourage global electronics manufacturers to set up manufacturing units on the Indian soil, the Indian Government had announced a production-linked-incentives (PLI) scheme last month. PM Narendra Modi had met Apple officials as well as some global phone makers in December last year.

The tech giant plans to take advantage of the several production-linked-incentives (PLI) scheme program of the Indian government which encourages the local companies to carry out local production. Foxconn and Wistron are the two manufacturers of Apple products in India. Since Apple only sells a fraction of its total production in India, it doesn’t make the country a big market for the company. Instead, Apple will use India as a base manufacturing and exporting unit of the company, which will help it essentially diversify its production out of China.

The move comes in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic which hit the tech companies. Apple currently has a market share of about 2-3% in the country. The company only manufactures phones worth $0.5 billion locally whereas the phone sales are worth $1.5 billion in the country. They currently produce iPhone XR and iPhone 7 locally and also used to manufacture some of the models that have been discontinued globally from Apple’s production portfolio, like iPhone 6 and iPhone SE.