A lack of good infrastructure and suppliers were the biggest hurdles to making technology products in India, but the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make In India’ push is slowly but surely changing this long held notion.
Sources reveal that Foxconn is looking to build the Apple products in India.
Earlier, the same problem forced most of India’s phone companies to get their products from the mature markets of China and Taiwan.
The world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronic products however, noted India is fast become an increasingly popular manufacturing hub for electronics, with a large pool of workers with technical know-how. Having said that, it lags behind China as a go-to place for electronics manufacturing.
The move of shifting its facility to India could help Foxconn potentially mitigate the rising labor costs in China.
The group is already in talks and if it works we could soon see Foxconn manufacture iPhones, iPads and iPods in India for both, domestic as well as global sales. Lower production costs could also help Foxconn keep hold of Apple orders amid intensifying competition.
Foxconn is sending a delegation of their officers to scout for locations in a month’s time,” Subhash Desai, Industries Minister of India’s western state Maharashtra, told Reuters.
The smartphone boom in India indicates the time is just right to focus on expansion plans and increasing volume in India to a comparable level with the China market in the next five years.
Apple has 10 percent market share in India, trailing Samsung and local manufacturers. The country also has the second-highest number of mobile phone accounts behind China.
It is likely that there will be a steep rise up to 650 million smartphones in the country by 2019, according to networking solutions company Cisco Systems. So, the move from Foxconn shouldn’t come as a surprise to many