Apple assembly partner Pegatron's board of directors is said to have approved a proposal to spend $150 million to build a manufacturing plant in India.
The new facility is expected to begin production in the second half of next year or in early 2022, with more investments planned in the country over the next two years, reported India's Economic Times, citing unnamed executives.
Pegatron, Apple's second-largest iPhone assembler after Foxconn, registered its India subsidiary in July, and said that the global health crisis had made it hard for staff to visit India, which had resulted in delays. The facility would be the company's first to be established in the country, and would likely be involved in future iPhone assembly.
Pegatron has been cleared to take part in India's billion-dollar Production-Linked Incentive Scheme, which provides incentives on locally-produced smartphones. The Taipei-based assembler joins rival iPhone manufacturers Foxconn and Wistron, which are already signed up to the scheme.
Pegatron recently drew the ire of Apple after it was discovered that the iPhone supplier had been committing labor violations at a student workers' program at its Shanghai and Kunshan campuses in eastern China.
Apple put Pegatron on probation as a result of the violations, and while the supplier's current iPhone business is not expected to be affected, it could lose some iPhone 12 orders to rival Luxshare next year.
Top Rated Comments
* People are more expansive (more expansive products)
* Scaling up is very hard
* There just aren’t enough people that want to work on such jobs*
* In Western Europe we import people from Eastern Europe for quite a few job categories because people in Western Europe are too lazy for them:
* Warehouse sorting
* Horticulture
* Meat industry
* Manufacturing
And many more. I think the US has the same problem finding people for those jobs.
Now, in the whole production chain, when you take into account the hardware design, such as Apple Silicon (not the manufacturing but the design), the software, the packaging design, in other words, the high paying jobs related to Apple devices, most of those are located in the US.
They outsource the cheap labor you wouldnt really want unless you’re a developing nation like India or Mexico.
Were I a US citizen I would be happy having all the high skilled jobs, time to retrain the workforce for those unemployed so they can move up in the production chain instead of expecting to be tightening screws for a living any more.
Apple can lower the price if they are able to manufacture in India (avoiding 20% or so import duty).
I think more and more low and middle end products will be manufactured in India.