Apple and Foxconn have always emphasized reducing the proportion of manufacturing in China and shifting production lines to India and Vietnam. However, they have suffered major setbacks in India recently. Wistron, one of Apple's important foundries, was forced to sell the factory to the Indian consortium Tata Group, Wistron also announced that it will dissolve all operations in India and withdraw from the Indian market.
The development of Wistron in India is not smooth. In 2020, Wistron sold the Kunshan factory to Luxshare Precision, thus ending its iPhone OEM factory in mainland China and entering India to set up a factory for iPhone OEM. It can be seen from Wistron's determination at that time.
However, Wistron has been developing in India for more than two years, and the number of employees in the factory has only reached about 10,000, which is far from the 80,000 employees in the Kunshan factory. However, even for such a small factory, the Indian consortium Tata The group also took a fancy to it. Tata Group asked Wistron to sell most of its shares to Tata in the near future. This move shows the brutality of the Indian consortium, which hit Wistron even more, leading Wistron to decide to sell the factory After that, simply withdraw from the Indian market.
Wistron’s experience in India is naturally not good news for Apple and Foxconn. This shows that setting up a foundry in India faces too many unfavorable factors. Wistron’s 10,000-person factory had staff stoppages and factory fires. The problem of factories stopping production from time to time has now attracted the coveted attention of Indian consortiums, which undoubtedly cast a shadow over them.
The development of Foxconn in India is actually not smooth. In 2014, Foxconn announced that it would invest 5 billion US dollars to build a factory in India. In 2019, Foxconn set up an OEM factory for Apple in India. However, in the past three years, the number of employees in Foxconn's Indian factory has only increased to 17,000, which is far from being comparable to the 300,000 employees of Zhengzhou Foxconn.
Similar to Wistron, Guo Taiqiang, the younger brother of Foxconn founder Terry Gou, established a factory in India to provide supporting facilities for Foxconn. However, Guo Taiqiang’s factory also suffered a fire in March this year, causing 10 production lines to burn down 4 and a loss of 12 million US dollars. Looking back now What happened to Wistron, perhaps the fire in Guo Taiqiang's factory was not an accident.
These factors are very unfavorable information for Foxconn. At the end of last year, Foxconn originally announced that it would take another three years to increase the number of employees in the Indian factory to 70,000. However, Foxconn recently stated that the plan has changed. The number will only increase to about 50,000 people, a significant reduction from the original plan, which is likely to be related to what happened to Wistron.
Foxconn’s establishment of a factory in India is also facing the same problems that Wistron encountered before. The canteen problem and overtime problem have caused Indian employees to stop working and production, which shows that India’s culture is very different from China. Compared with Zhengzhou Foxconn last year After taking over the production capacity of Shanghai Pegatron, in the case of insufficient number of employees, by giving huge incentives to attract employees to take turns, the production line does not stop for 24 hours, and finally ensures the production capacity of iPhone 13.
Foxconn still faces the problem of an imperfect industrial chain when setting up a factory in India. So far, iPhones produced in India have to transport a large number of accessories from mainland China to the Indian factory. This has led to low production efficiency and high production costs in Indian factories, making Foxconn miserable. Word.
Perhaps Foxconn and Apple have suffered enough in India. Foxconn recently announced the establishment of a new business headquarters in Zhengzhou to expand the business of the Zhengzhou factory. Apple has reported that it will hand over about 15% of the iPhone 15 ultra's orders to Luxshare Precision, a foundry in mainland China. , showing that they all invariably increased their efforts to increase Chinese manufacturing, highlighting that Chinese manufacturing is irreplaceable.