Man, finally this came along. Apple had been negotiating for almost 3 years to setup manufacturing in India. Foxconn got a start in the outskirts of Bangalore where they manufacture iPhone SEs.<p>I as a customer am super glad this is coming along. Tired of paying a premium for Apple products in India. In addition to iPhones I seriously hope they start iPad manufacturing as well. IMHO iPads will probably have a better success rate in India once the prices reach parity with US.
Trying to interpret this.<p>First of all $300M isn't a lot of money for this sort of operation. I guess it barely buys a good line of equipment, installed with an operable workforce, if that. Secondly, the amount of manual labour in iPhone assembly has to be pretty minimal with respect to margins. Can anyone enlighten us to the management situation?<p>I guess perhaps the true story behind the 'asserted' transition to an additional base in India includes other factors like: freeing Foxconn capital from China (currently their largest production base, with rising costs, a slowing market and perennial foreign exchange hassles), gaining additional internal production operations experience within a foreign non-'Chinese' (ie. Taiwan/China) environment, and cross-jurisdictional legal/tax/tariff/exchange rate hedging. (The US-China trade war has to have scared the pants off anyone in a consumer electronics this heavily.)
Pretty meaningful change. Hopefully the advent of this will result in increased social mobility and the rise of a homegrown hardware technology industry in the coming years.
This is so against globalisation and global trade it‘s not even funny.
Totally cool if Apple did this voluntarily, but the only reason they‘re doing it is to prevent high import taxes.<p>India is a huge market. So it‘s all good. Brazil is a good deal smaller and requires the same thing. So does Argentina (and is even smaller). Now imagine every country would do this.
Do you know if these phones will be exported to the US or just for domestic consumption in India?<p>Also how "complicated" is the manufacturing? Is it just lsat-mile assembling of all pre-made components shipped in from the US, China, Germany, et al. or the same technical processes and complexity that goes on in one of these Chinese plants that pump out the iPhone X, XS and XS Maxes?
This illustrates why all of those stories[1] about why Apple can't manufacture in the USA are relatively hollow.<p>Apple doesn't manufacture in the US as they are not forced to manufacture in the US. If they were, they'd make it happen and work-around any issues, just as they have in India.<p>Apple doesn't want to manufacture in India (via Foxconn) but the Indian regulations and government didn't budge which forced Apple's and Foxconn's hand. Result: Apple/Foxconn is now making iPhones in India.<p>If the US citizens stood up for their own interests more, then there would be a Made in the USA iPhone... perhaps more expensive than a China made one, but Apple may decide to absorb the margin hit to retain marketshare in their largest market.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/28/18200330/why-apple-cant-made-in-america" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/28/18200330/why-apple-cant-m...</a>