We’re today learning of a major acceleration in plans to shift more production of Apple devices from China to India. In less than one year, Foxconn has increased its planned investment in an Indian plant by almost 400%.
It follows a recent report that Apple has told its battery suppliers that it would like as many iPhone 16 batteries as possible to be manufactured in India …
Shifting Apple production from China to India
The need for Apple to lessen its dependence on China as a manufacturing center has been clear for many years, but the impact of the pandemic at the world’s biggest iPhone assembly plant drove home the urgency. The COVID-19-related disruption was estimated to have cost the company a billion dollars per week.
Apple has targeted India as its primary second manufacturing home. We’ve been hearing ambitious reports for some time now – that a quarter of all iPhones could be made in India by 2025, and that this could rise to half of all iPhones by 2027 – but progress has so far seemed relatively modest.
A fresh report in September indicated that Apple was aiming for a five-fold increase in Indian iPhone production within five years, and today’s news seems to match the scale of that ambition.
Foxconn almost quadrupling investment in Indian plant
At the start of the year, Foxconn announced that it would be investing $700M in an iPhone plant in Bengaluru, India. That number was subsequently more than doubled to $1.6B, and Bloomberg today reports that it has been further increased to a total of $2.7B – almost four times the initial planned sum.
Foxconn Technology Group has won approval to invest at least $1 billion more in a plant it’s building in India that will make Apple Inc. products, a major ramp-up in its goal of building a hub beyond China.
The world’s biggest assembler of iPhones plans to spend that amount on top of the $1.6 billion it earlier set aside for the 300-acre site close to Bengaluru’s airport, people familiar with the matter said […]
Including the most recently approved spending, the Taiwanese firm will have set aside roughly $2.7 billion for the site, set to become the centerpiece of the its manufacturing capabilities in India.
While the plant may set aside some production capacity for other clients, it’s reported that “the bulk of the investment” is dedicated to Apple.
Another Apple supplier, Tata, is separately planning to build one of India’s biggest iPhone plants, further adding to output from the country.
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