Apple to Move Production of Top-End Apple Phones to India, Out of China
Sources say it will help mitigate impact of the trade war between China and the US
According to Reuters, Apple will move production of their higher end phones out of China and over to FoxConn in India. The change could happen as early as 2019, say Reuters’ sources.
Apple Inc will begin assembling its top-end iPhones in India through the local unit of Foxconn as early as 2019, the first time the Taiwanese contract manufacturer will have made the product in the country, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Importantly, Foxconn will be assembling the most expensive models, such as devices in the flagship iPhone X family, the source said, potentially taking Apple’s business in India to a new level.
The work will take place at Foxconn’s plant in Sriperumbudur town in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, said the source, who is not authorized to speak to the media and so declined to be named.
Foxconn, which already makes phones for Xiaomi Corp in India, will invest 25 billion Indian rupees ($356 million) to expand the plant, including investment in iPhone production, Tamil Nadu’s Industries Minister M C Sampath told Reuters.
The investment may create as many as 25,000 jobs, he added.
Another source also said Foxconn planned to assemble iPhones in India, in a move that could help both it and Apple to limit the impact of a trade war between the United States and China.
Apple’s cheaper phones are already manufactured in India.
iPhone SE and 6S is already made in India, but not by Foxconn.
— Tim Stenovec (@timsteno) December 27, 2018
Phones will be made by Foxconn, which already makes phones for Xiaomi in India.
— Tim Stenovec (@timsteno) December 27, 2018
This also shows optimism about the Indian market — iPhones made in India aren't subject to Indian tariffs https://t.co/2nMtJLLBOT
— Tim Stenovec (@timsteno) December 27, 2018
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Comments
With all manufacturing overseas how can Apple still say it is an American company?
Isn’t there a lovely new-ish Foxconn plant in Wisconson?
i don’t care where they make them, i still won’t own one…
or anything else “Apple”, for that matter.
President Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi ought to have a bit of fun come April 1, 2019. State that they’re in disagreement and now a trade war will exist between the U.S. and India. April Fool!
Well, at least that should end thoughts of the Chinese putting bugs in the phones.
Build up India instead of China. Music to my ears.
Trade war… Apple benefited from Chinese labor and environmental practices. It seems that India is second in line to promote globalist profit through labor and environmental arbitrage.
The last time Apple tried manufacturing a product entirely in the US was, I believe, the Apple III. For those too young to remember, at the time the Apple ][ was a great success, and they planned to market the III to higher-end and business customers. It actually wasn’t a bad product, but to keep the manufacturing cost down Apple used a lot of robotics – and the arms seating the chips on the motherboard somehow had the tolerances set wrong so that the chips were “kinda” seated, but not firmly enuf so that repeated on/off heat/cool cycles wouldn’t cause chips to loosen in their sockets and computers to stop working.
The problem was fixable, pressing down firmly on the chips would seat them properly, but customers couldn’t be trusted to do that themselves without zapping the motherboard with static. For customers unwilling to ship computers back and do without for a week or more, the fix was to lift the computer say six inches above a flat surface and let it drop. This actually worked, but the Rube Goldberg nature of the fix struck the buying public as bizarre and Apple lost a lot of credibility over this.
Sounds like a smart move. India’s tech sector is no slouch, and, more trustworthy to do business with. No government-coerced theft of trade secrets, as the price of doing business in-country.
Incidentally, I’m going to promote the Indian epic movie “Bahaabuli: The Beginning” — I just watched the Tamil audio version (the films was released in different Indian dialects) and really enjoyed this movie. Epic mythology come-to-life, with plenty of Indian flair and flavor. It features one of the best motivational speeches ever committed to film. Fans of Hollywood “sword-and-sandal”-type epics, such as “Ben-Hur,” “Gladiator” and “300” will likely enjoy this one. Tamil audio seemed the best bet for authenticity, as most of the cast is Tamil. I’m looking forward to watching the sequel.
Whoops — I misspelled the title of the movie — it’s “Baahubali.”
thanks, guy. I just added it to my watch list (Both English and Tamil, just in case). If it disappoints I’ll have to downgrade your post 😉
Happy New Year!
The Apple III had many problems in addition to those bad chip sockets, including bad circuit board design. But its problems went beyond unreliable hardware.
The Apple III was supposed to be Apple’s business-oriented computer, as opposed to the Apple II which was viewed more as a hobbyist/home computer. And as such, Apple saw no reason to make the III fully compatible with the Apple II. With the near-fatal result that even if your Apple III worked reliably there wasn’t much software available to run on it.
Perhaps it might have survived had it not been released less than a year before the IBM PC. Yet although early IBM PCs had problems of their own, it quickly became apparent to most that IBM’s PC was just had better architecture and was a far more versatile platform than the Apple III.
Although it didn’t help that the Apple III was also absurdly expensive, with prices in the 4-$7,000. range.
Which is to say, the problems with the Apple III were not really manufacturing problems, but basic hardware and system architecture design problems.
A basic rule of electronics design implementation is to avoid using chip sockets and other internal connectors unless you’re willing to pay for high-quality ones, as otherwise the poor reliability of those cheap connectors will overwhelm any advantage in using them.
But a more basic problem with the Apple III was that, even if it had been reliable, it still didn’t offer nearly enough to justify its lofty price. Steve Wozniak described the Apple III as a triumph of marketing over engineering and, while he may have been right about the engineering, the marketing wasn’t so good either as it failed to provide what the market wanted (and was willing to pay for). In short, the Apple III’s failure seems to have had very little to do with where it was manufactured.
If you’re looking for a manufacturing story, the real change between then and now is that back then electronics brands often did their own manufacturing, yet today essentially 100% of all electronics manufacturing is done by contract manufacturers. It’s done that way because contract manufacturer’s are very, very good at what they do (because they have to be, that’s their entire business) and, because they manufacture the products of many companies in their facilities, they tend to be better at keeping the utilization of these costly plants close to capacity.
The USA today really has no electronics manufacturers capable of producing in massive quantities for the consumer market. And there’s no reason why we couldn’t, as electronics manufacturing has become so highly automated that labor costs are not all that important. Of course, that also means that such facilities will never provide mass employment (as auto factories once did).
But if we had some of these then perhaps we might worry a little bit less about clever foreign engineers preparing for future cyberwars by placing cleverly hidden hardware Trojans in the electronics we all use everyday.