Apple on track for quarter of all iPhones to be made in India by 2028 Apple is expected to have a quarter of all iPhones made in India by 2028, according to the country's IT minister. Rajeev Chandrasekhar tweeted the tidbit, crediting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme and adding: "Apple is moving to deepen the ecosystem by building a network of local vendors …
The main point is to fire a shot across the People's Republic’s bow. Just letting them know that they can be replaced. The local population is almost as big as China’s, Indian tech is at least as good as China’s, and India's government is NOT a bunch of murderous Communist thugs. True, they are murderous Hindu nationalist thugs, but they're not anywhere near the level of the CCP, and they can be voted out, something not happening in the PRC.
Not quite true -- they were making a profit back in the old days when they made the stuff in the US. Its just they could make more money by offshoring, partly because labor was cheaper (then) and partly because they could divest all the capital investment needed to make stuff.
You can still make a tidy product manufacturing in the US. I actually worked before retirement at a company that physically made electronic assemblies -- a real, live, gen-u-ine assembly line. The production equipment was either Japanese or German, of course, and a lot of the parts came from Asia even if they were nominally from US companies, but it actually made stuff. It was enough of a novelty to have a sort of sideline renting the facility for photo and movie shoots, becoming for a day a UPS warehouse or a Japanese biotech company, for example. (One time the production company even bought its own prop robot......it was an object of derision among the engineers!)
Its amazing what a difference being a closely held company with its own facility makes compared to the usual 'leveraged to the max' normal public company. Its really not the wages, you see......
By Sony indeed as a contract manufacturer*
Do they still make telly’s there too,
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/explore-the-raspberry-pi-factory-floor-in-wales-uk/
* they will probably get fucked off post IPO, to some cheap shit-hole in Vietnam to boost the margin/divvy/c-suite bonuses.
When Apple surges a new model Foxconn brings in 100K+ additional workers. You can't surge workforce like that in the US on a temporary basis - the unemployment insurance would kill you.
Some production may return to the US once it becomes cheaper to build robots to do the assembly than it is paying people to do it by hand. So long as it is done by hand, no chance.
The Indians can double their production in a matter of months. A maximum of 18 months after dumping China would see Apple back where they were. Plus points for taking a principled stand against Communist thuggery. It's not as though they don't have the cash reserves to ride out the storm.
What percentage of parts are actually made in India? If India's iPhone factories are merely screwdriver operations assembling knockdown-kits the percentage states is merely window-dressing.
It wouldn't surpise me if China invaded Taiwan that Apple admitted that 99% of all iPhone parts were still made in China and that a trade-embargo would effectively sink the company. So the U.S. government would have the choice to sink a $2 trillion or to hit China economically.
Given the components on most electronics are minute and cant actually be done by a human hand...and its all done by robots and machines... how can the human cost for these things even matter ?
I dont *appreciate* why it would require much if any human intervention to make an iphone...
Take the cpu, what exactly can a human do to make a cpu in the manufacturing phase ?
Repeat this question for all the other components.
THe only human job i can possibly think of is in the final assembly and even then the human can hardly do much. So if you factor an hour or two for that part, how can it be cheaper to move a billion factory and rebuild everything just to save a dollars in human labour for each phone ?
I had read some time ago the production cost breakdown of an iPhone. It was sold for ~500$ at that time and the production cost was ~100$ ... of that, man labor cost was ~6$, and nearly 1/3 of the cost came actually from Germany, meaning way more than the labor cost.
The real reason mass-produced stuff is not produced anymore in Europe is due to strikes: people here have a tendency to be able and ready to block a mega factory if they're not happy about the work environment. No such danger in China or India apparently.
So basically my observation was right ?
I would imagine it costs tens of millions or maybe more to move a factory that assembles iphones, just to say a few dollars on each iphone ?
Surely the cost of moving the factory is more than all the wages they have paid to all factory workers who ever assembled an iphone.
$6 per iphone * 1B iphones ( i dont think they have sold anywhere near this much) is still only $6b. Moving a factory every other year surely costs MORE than $500M.
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