The Cupertino-based company, which is looking to increasingly decouple from China, also aims to increase local value addition from its Indian suppliers in line with the approach that it has adopted in China, they added.
“In China, (Apple) has the highest domestic value addition in the world, which is 28%. The value-add (in India currently) is around 11-12% and is expected to go up to between 15% and 18%,” said one person cited above.
“What (Apple) is doing today (in India) will become practically five or six times (more).” Queries sent to Apple remained unanswered. Experts are of the view that as India becomes an important market both for exports as well as for local sale of Apple products, it will trigger a vibrant supplier ecosystem. And, also emerge as a potential R&D hub for software-to-silicon design.
“The current local value addition, which is a contribution to the dollar value of the total manufacturing and design cost in an iPhone produced in India, stands at 14% compared to 41% in China,” said Neil Shah, vice president at Counterpoint Research.
“With the right investments and expansion, Apple has potential to increase it to more than 20% in the next three to five years,” he added.
India suppliers
Last week, ET reported that Apple has emerged as the country’s largest blue-collar job creator with 1.5 lakh jobs created across the phone maker’s supplier network, since the start of the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for smartphones in August 2021. In addition, about three lakh people are estimated to be employed indirectly.
In its Monday edition ET reported that Apple contractors including Foxconn, Tata and Salcomp will provide residential facilities to factory employees with a total of 78,000 units to be constructed, of which 58,000 will be in Tamil Nadu.
Apple’s suppliers in India who rank as top job creators include Tata Electronics, which makes enclosures for iPhones at its Hosur facility, Salcomp Technologies, which produces enclosures and power adaptors, as well as Foxlink and Sunwoda, which make cables and batteries for iPhones.
In addition to this, several thousand new jobs have been created by Avary Technologies, CCL Industries and Flex, which are suppliers of iPhone sub-assemblies and components. Recent reports have indicated that the iPhone maker expects to manufacture fifty million devices annually from India by 2030 accounting for nearly a fourth of its entire iPhone production. Currently, India-based units are estimated to supply about 7% of all the iPhones sold globally.
Contract manufacturing
Apple, which started making iPhones in India in 2017 under the PLI scheme, works with contract manufacturers — Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron. These units are also producing an increasing number of components locally.
The three Taiwanese contract manufacturers were cleared to receive incentives under the PLI scheme have created over 77,000 direct jobs. Foxconn leads with 41,000, followed by Wistron (27,300) and Pegatron (9,200), as per data available from the government.
Last year, the India unit of Wistron was acquired by the Tata Group.
These iPhone-assembly units are set to hire more than 10,000 people directly in the peak June-September period, when production swells to a full three shifts in order to meet global demand for the next iPhone. New models are typically launched in September. Apple is among the largest phone manufacturers in India with a market share of about 6% in fiscal year 2022-23.
In January, ET had reported that Apple produced iPhones worth over ?1 lakh crore in India last year, having increased output sharply from the year before. Of this, made-in-India iPhones worth ?65,000 crore were exported in the January-December period.
During the earnings call in February, Apple chief executive officer (CEO) Tim Cook said the company continues to see “strong double-digit growth” in many emerging markets with all-time records in several countries including a December quarter record in India.
