Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn has bought a huge piece of land on the outskirts of the Indian technology center Bengaluru, the key Apple The supplier announced this in a filing on Tuesday as it tries to diversify production outside of China.
Foxconn, also known by its official name Hon Hai Precision Industry, is the world’s largest custom electronics manufacturer and one of Apple’s primary assemblers iPhones.
Both companies are looking to diversify away from China, where much of their manufacturing is based, after strict Covid guidelines in recent years and ongoing diplomatic tensions with the United States impacted production.
The acquisition of 1.2 million square meters in Devanahalli, near the airport of India’s tech hub Bengaluru, was announced in a statement to the London Stock Exchange.
Its subsidiary Foxconn Hon Hai Technology India Mega Development paid Rs. 3 billion for the website, it said.
Another Foxconn entity is acquiring land use rights for a 480,000-square-meter site in Vietnam’s Nghe An province, it said.
Karnataka State Premier Basavaraj S. Bommai said in March that Apple would be manufacturing iPhones “soon” at a new plant in the state, which would create “about 100,000 jobs.”
Bloomberg News reported this month, citing unnamed sources, that Foxconn plans to invest US$700 million (about Rs.5,700 crore) in a new factory in Karnataka in the same month.
Foxconn chairman Young Liu then visited the state to “deepen partnerships … and seek collaboration in new areas such as semiconductor development and electric vehicles,” he said in a statement.
He also met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said the two’s talks “covered various issues aimed at improving India’s technology and innovation ecosystem.”
Foxconn has been manufacturing Apple phones in India since 2019 at its plant in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
Two other Taiwanese suppliers, Wistron and Pegatron, also manufacture and assemble Apple devices in India.
Apple has made its own foray into India and CEO Tim cook Last month, the company opened its first two retail stores in the world’s most populous country.
The California-based company is betting heavily on the country of 1.4 billion people, which is home to the second-highest number of smartphone users in the world after China.
The world’s largest company by market value is also expanding its manufacturing footprint in India.
Apple announced last September that it would be manufacturing its latest iPhone 14 in India, just weeks after launching the flagship model.
The country accounted for seven percent of Apple’s iPhone production last year, according to Bloomberg, lagging behind the US, China, Japan and other countries.
Apple’s expansion of manufacturing in India bolsters Modi’s “Make in India” strategy, which he uses to push foreign companies to manufacture goods in the South Asian country.
(This story was not edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
