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]]>Few fun facts about your favorite Apple iPhone
iPhone and India
While ‘i’ in iPhone primarily stands for internet, Steve Jobs added Instruct, Inspire, Inform and Individual never supposing someday ‘i’ would denote India too. Apple now manufactures its flagship iPhone 11 at the Foxconn plant near Chennai, India.
A close association – India is not only the second-largest smartphone market in the world after China but is also technology driven and capable of manufacturing smartphones.
Taking a cue from souring relations between China and the world due to the coronavirus outbreak, the Indian government was quick to launch a Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme to attract electronics manufacturing in India. India’s PLI scheme came into effect on August 1, 2020. The brainchild of PM Narendra Modi’s government, it aims to attract foreign investment mainly in the mobile phone sector. This scheme with an outlay of INR 40,000 crore extends to mobile phones and electronic components like Printed Circuit Boards (PCB), photopolymer films, and Assembly Testing Marking Packaging (ATMP) units. The PLI scheme outlines that companies which manufacture mobile phones priced at INR 15,000 and above and which will make a cumulative investment of INR 1000 crore over four years starting with INR 250 crore in the first year will qualify for an incentive of 6% for the first two years followed by 5% for the next two and 4% in the fifth year subject to sales reaching INR 25,000 crore over five years.
Riding on this PLI scheme, Apple Inc. intends to produce up to USD 40 billion worth of iPhones, mainly for exports through its contract manufacturers in India, Wistron and Foxconn.
Wistron plant near Bengaluru has been operational since May 2017, manufacturing iPhones for exports. It used to earlier produce the iPhone SE, which is now discontinued. Today this facility manufactures iPhone 7 and is soon expected to undertake the manufacture of iPhone SE.
Foxconn on the other hand has plans to invest up to USD 1 billion to expand its plant capacity located near Chennai. Recently, it was chosen as the manufacturing hub for iPhone 11, Apple’s flagship model launched in September 2019. Definitely, this decision to locally produce the iPhone11 costing INR 63,900/- helped save Apple close to 22% import duty. The Foxconn facility also has a production line for Apple’s iPhone XR.
Pegatron which is the second-largest iPhone assembler after Foxconn is actively considering investing in India to set up a local subsidiary. Once, that happens Apple’s dependability on India as a manufacturing hub is sure to increase and improve.
Apple India Growth
Mobile phone exports from India is expected to reach USD 100 billion by 2025. While on one side, 80% of the total manufacturing capacity was used to export the iPhones under ‘Make in India’ PLI incentive, on the other, iPhone local sales also began to show a rise. As per CyberMedia Research, the India unit of Apple sold 1.7 million units of iPhones in 2018. In Q1 of 2018-19, Apple in India enjoyed an overall market share of 65% in the mobile phone segment priced above USD 500. But by Q1 of 2020, Apple witnessed a 78% year-on-year (YoY) growth in the India sales of iPhones despite the coronavirus pandemic. Mainly iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max contributed to this growth. CEO Tim Cook to acknowledge India as a ‘key’ market for Apple Cupertino’s continued growth is gearing the company to launch the first online store in India and its first physical retail store by 2021. This will greatly benefit the Apple iPhone and iPad users to avail of Apple’s hallmark services like Apple Care.
India is finally getting
a bigger bite of the Apple!
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