Monday, February 13, 2017
Apple Going to Start New Company In Bangalore, India
Tech companies to
meet on legal challenge to Trump immigration order
fter months of negotiations, Apple
is set to start manufacturing iPhones in the Indian tech hub Bangalore, a
government official says.
The state of Karnataka, where Bangalore is located,
has reached an agreement in principle with
Apple said Priyank Kharge, the state's information
technology minister.
Kharge told CNNMoney on Friday
that iPhone assembly could start as soon as April at a plant on the outskirts
of Bangalore. The plant will be operated by Wistron, an Apple supplier that's headquartered
in Taiwan.
Apple would neither confirm
nor deny the Indian official's remarks. The company said in a statement last
week that it has been talking to the Indian government about "expanding" its local
operations
.
The U.S. tech giant currently sells iPhones and
other products in India through local distributors, but it lags far behind Samsung and Chinese brands such as Xiaomi, Oppo and Lenovo in
terms of market share.
Apple has been hampered by a
rule that prevented it from opening its own retail stores in the country.
Foreign retailers can only sell products if 30% of the raw materials used to
make them are sourced locally. The Bangalore manufacturing unit could pave the
way for the first Apple stores in India.
Setting up a new plant in India would also be at
odds with President Trump's call for American companies to create manufacturing
jobs at home. But it looks like Apple has decided India's rapidly ballooning
smartphone market is too tempting to resist.
The South Asian nation
currently has more than 300 million smartphone users, and is poised to overtake
the U.S. as the world's second largest market for the devices this year.
The government said discussions are on with Apple for collaborations in other areas too. It did not specify what these areas are, but the government is said to be pushing for manufacture of some phone components too, so as to create a manufacturing ecosystem in the city.
In May, Apple had announced a design and development accelerator in the city to grow the iOS developer community and also guide Indian developers to leverage Apple's programming language Swift and build apps for Apple TV and Apple Watch.
"We made concerted efforts to reach out to Apple directly. We want to create a conducive environment for global majors like Apple so that we emerge as their preferred partner in their India growth story," Kharge told TOI. Gujarat, Maharasthra and Telangana too were competing for the Apple facility.
Apple uses a fairly complex supply chain. The parts for the iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac are manufactured, mostly by third parties, across 28 countries. It has 766 suppliers, of which 346 are based in China, 126 in Japan, and 69 in the US. There is one in India, a unit of Flextronics in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu.
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