Tata Electronics Private Limited, a Tata group company, will begin manufacturing iPhones in India for domestic and global markets soon, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar announced on social media platform X. Tata Electronic is acquiring the iPhone-making plant of Taiwanese firm Wistron.
PM @narendramodi Ji's visionary PLI scheme has already propelled India into becoming a trusted & major hub for smartphone manufacturing and exports.
— Rajeev Chandrasekhar 🇮🇳 (@Rajeev_GoI) October 27, 2023
Now within just two and a half years, @TataCompanies will now start making iPhones from India for domestic and global markets from… pic.twitter.com/kLryhY7pvL
“PM @narendramodi Ji’s visionary PLI scheme has already propelled India into becoming a trusted & major hub for smartphone manufacturing and exports. Now within just two and a half years, @TataCompanies will now start making iPhones from India for domestic and global markets from India,” the minister wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
He congratulated Tata for taking over Wistron operations, which announced its exit from the Indian market in May this year. “Thank you @Wistron for your contributions, and great going for Apple in building a global supply chain from India with Indian companies at its helm,” Chandrasekhar wrote on X.
He also posted a statement by Wistron Corp. announcing that its board has granted approval for the sale of its 100% stake in Wistron InfoComm Manufacturing (India) Private Ltd. to the Tata group for USD 125 million, around Rs 1040 crore.
Wistron Corporation announced that its subsidiaries, SMS InfoComm (Singapore) Private Limited and Wistron Hong Kong Limited will sign a share purchase agreement with Tata Electronics for a 100% indirect stake in Wistron InfoComm Manufacturing (India) Private Limited (WMMI) for an estimated $125 million. The Wistron plant is located near Bengaluru in Karnataka and employs over 10,000 workers.
The development provides a huge impetus to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship initiative ‘Make in India’ giving India an edge over China, which has been a primary manufacturing hub for Apple in Asia until now.
In late September, a report citing government sources claimed that Apple has plans to scale up production in India by over five-fold to around $40 billion (about 3.32 lakh crore) in the next four to five years. The company has already crossed the $7 billion production mark in the last financial year.
Tata’s takeover of Wistron is a positive sign in that the former brand is well-versed in the local work culture in India, something that was a challenge for the Taiwan-based company Wistron. Reports suggest that Wistron’s inability to get deeper into Apple’s supply chain including component manufacturing and vendor-managed inventory holding was one of the key reasons why it is exiting India.
The announcement comes after Prime Minister Modi addressed the 7th edition of the Indian Mobile Congress 2023 at Bharat Mandapam.
Addressing the event, the Prime Minister gave the call that the “future is here and now”. He said, “In the rapidly changing world of the 21st century, this event has the potential to change the fate of crore of people. There was a time when we talked about the future, which meant the next decade or the next century. But today, due to changes in technology we say that the future is here and now.”
