Acting upon their conveyed plans to make massive strides in the Indian market, Apple has begun manufacturing the iPhone 13 in India. The manufacturing will be on contract with the taiwanese manufacturer FoxConn at Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu.
The move is also speculated to be linked with the rising unrest in China, as Apple has been trying to disassociate some manufacturing process from China to other emerging markets like India, Vietnam and Mexico. The Indian government’s Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes have also shown promise to the electronics industry.
For quite some time now, Apple has been stressing on the need to take India as a more serious market for its phones. India has started showing aggressive growth signs in terms of revenues it rakes in for the Cupertino giant. It recently crossed $1Bn annual sales mark, which led to Apple reciprocating the same by adding India to list of countries where its phones are launched at the same time as the US and China.
In a report, Apple was quoted saying “We are excited to begin making iPhone 13 — with its beautiful design, advanced camera systems for stunning photos and videos, and the incredible performance of the A15 Bionic chip — right here in India for our local customers.”
Production of iPhones in India started back in year 2017, when Apple set up manufacturing the IPhone SE in India. Currently, Apple manufactures IPhone 11, IPhone 12 in contract with FoxConn. The company is also tying-up with manufacturers Wistron and Pegatron, who will be manufacturing the IPhone 12.
None of the Pro models have gotten the green light for local manufacturing, Presumably due to the higher pricing and hence lower demand in the budget smartphone dominated Indian market. Another reason could be the materials required for the premium models not available for procurement locally.
The IPhone 13 comes in three different storage options, Those being 128 GB priced at INR 79,900, 256 GB at INR 89,900, and the highest 512 GB at INR 1,09,900. Local manufacturing of theses phones is expected to yield savings of around 20% in import duties. This might not guarantee more pocket-friendly pricing on the phone, but its certainly a possibility. No timeline has been obtained as to when we will see Made in India IPhone 13s.
