Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn has bought a huge piece of land on the outskirts of India’s generation hub in Bangalore, Apple’s most sensible supplier said on Tuesday in a document seeking to diversify production out of China.
Also known by its official name, Hon Hai Precision Industry, Foxconn is the global manufacturer of contract electronics and one of Apple’s leading iPhone assemblers.
Both companies will move production away from China after strict Covid policies, a trade instability crisis and ongoing diplomatic tensions with the US. U. S. companies that have damaged production.
The acquisition of 1. 2 million square meters (13 million square feet) in Devanahalli, near Bangalore Airport, was announced in a statement to the London Stock Exchange.
He said subsidiary Foxconn Hon Hai Technology India Mega Development paid 3 billion rupees ($37 million) for the site, the length of more than 50 blocks from Manhattan.
Another Foxconn unit in the process of obtaining land use rights at a 480,000-square-meter site in Vietnam’s Nghe An province, he added.
Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj S. Bommai said in March that Apple would “soon” manufacture iPhones in a new factory that would create “around 100,000 jobs. “
Bloomberg News reported that month that Foxconn plans to invest $700 million in a new plant in Karnataka.
Foxconn Chairman Young Liu then visited the state and also met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who suggested that foreign corporations manufacture goods in the South Asian nation.
Foxconn has been producing Apple phones in India since 2019 at its factory in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
The company is expected to open a new facility in Telangana state next week, media reported.
Two Taiwanese suppliers, Wistron and Pegatron, also manufacture and assemble Apple devices in India.
Apple has made its own breakthrough in India and leading executive Tim Cook last month opened his first two retail outlets in the world’s most populous country.
The California-based company is important in the country of 1. 4 billion more people, home to the second-largest number of smartphone users in the world, after China.
Navkendar Singh of trading company International Data Corporation told AFP that Apple had already shown itself in India, with iPhone sales of 6. 7 million last year.
“That’s a smart expansion considering Apple is betting on a price diversity of over $500,” he added.
The world’s largest corporate market is also expanding its production footprint in India.
Apple announced last September that it would manufacture its new iPhone 14 in India, weeks after the launch of the flagship model.
Last year, the country accounted for 7% of Apple’s iPhone production, according to Bloomberg, behind the United States, China, Japan and other countries.
China, through Apple’s biggest maker of products, saw production halted due to violent protests last November at the country’s largest iPhone factory, also owned by Foxconn.
Hundreds of workers protested against situations and wages at the factory in the central city of Zhengzhou, driven in part by public frustration with the government’s zero-tolerance policy in the face of the covid pandemic.
“Having contingency or diversification plans helps to rely too heavily on one region,” Prachir Singh, senior analyst at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, told AFP.
“It’s not that Chinese operations are falling to zero,” he added. “It’s about building a similar global in India so they can rely on sites. “