This could be a significant fillip to the 'Make in India' initiative. The Tata Group is fully geared to bring on stream a new facility in India for assembling iPhones. Operations are likely to begin in Q2, October-December, the festive quarter of 2024.
Situated in Hosur, Tamil Nadu, the new facility will become intrinsic to Tata's iPhone manufacturing. This facility is likely to generate employment for more than 50,000 people, and a vast majority of those will be women.
Spanning 250 acres, the Hosur facility will put together iPhones with supplies from a Tata Electronics unit that was set up a few years ago. This new facility will see Tata investing Rs 6,000 crore, reports said.
The Tata Group had acquired local Indian operations of Taiwanese electronics company Wistron back in October last year for $125 million. Foxconn, Tata, and Pegatron now make up the triumvirate of large iPhone assemblers in India.
Plans for the Tata Group's large-scale iPhone assembly plant in Hosur, Tamil Nadu, broke in December. Tata is already handling an iPhone manufacturing site in Karnataka acquired from Wistron.
This move comes as a part of Apple's new manufacturing strategy, with an ambitious target to locally produce more than 50 million iPhones every year in India.
Meanwhile, Apple has begun training thousands of workers at its Foxconn-operated factory in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, as it readies the launch of the newest iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max devices in India following their global launch this fall.
The iPhone 16 series will be coming to India the same day it is going to be launched across the world, just like how the iPhone 15 series was introduced last year. Soon after, probably not too long after, is going to be the iPhone 16 Plus model.
Foxconn is one of the major Apple suppliers in the world, and so far, it has invested $1.4 billion into India with promises of more. Operations began to grow in-country and reached $10 billion as of the last fiscal, its CEO and Chairman Young Liu said.
Operations at plants of Apple in India reached a valuation of USD 23.5 billion in the last fiscal itself.
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