Trump keen for US to manufacture iPhones; here's how India is doing it

Irish Times

a day ago

A new
iPhone
factory in an out-of-the-way corner of
India
looks like a spaceship from another planet.
Foxconn
, the Taiwanese company that assembles most of the world's iPhones for Apple, has landed amid the boulders and millet fields of Devanahalli.
The sleek buildings rising on the 300-acre site, operational but still growing, are emerging evidence of an estimated $2.5 billion (€2.1 billion) investment.
This is what
US president Donald Trump
wants Apple to do in the United States.
What is happening in this part of India shows why that sounds attractive and why it will probably not happen without sustained government financial support to revive US manufacturing and training to expand the pool of qualified factory workers.
READ MORE
In India, Apple is doubling down on a bet it placed after the Covid-19 pandemic began and before Trump's re-election. Many countries, starting with the US, were eager to reduce their reliance on factories in China. Apple, profoundly dependent on Chinese production, was quick to act.
Analysts at Counterpoint Research calculated that India had succeeded in satisfying 18 per cent of the global demand for iPhones by early this year, two years after Foxconn started making iPhones in India. By the end of 2025, with the Devanahalli plant fully online, Foxconn is expected to be assembling between 25 per cent and 30 per cent of iPhones in India.
This newest factory is the largest of several making Apple products in India. Its full frame is still rising from red dust. Cranes are at work above the skeletons of high-rise dormitories for female workers. But about 8,000 people are already at work on two factory floors. Soon, there should be 40,000.
The effects on the region are transformative. It's a field day for job seekers and landowners. And the kind of crazy-quilt supply chain of smaller industries that feeds Apple's factory towns in China is coalescing in India's heartland. Businesses are selling Foxconn the goods and services it needs to make iPhones, including tiny parts, assembly-line equipment and worker recruitment.
Some of the firms are Indian; others are Taiwanese, South Korean or American. Some were already in the area, while others are setting up in India for the first time.
The changes spurred by Foxconn are rippling broadly through Bengaluru, a city of eight million people that had a start in the 20th century as home to India's first aerospace centres. But its manufacturing base was pushed aside, first by call centres and then by flashier work in microchip design and outsourced professional services. Going back to the factory floor, as they're doing in Devanahalli, is what Trump wants US workers to do.
To see the changes afoot here is to understand the allure of bringing back manufacturing. Wages are rising 10 to 15 per cent around the Foxconn plant. Businesses are quietly making deals to supply Foxconn and Apple's other contractors.
A factory that makes plastic parts for bank cash machines hosted a team from Foxconn for a tour. A foundry that makes yarn-spinning machinery was hoping it might start making the metal bits Foxconn might need in its new factory.
Neither Foxconn nor Apple replied to requests for comment about their operations in India.
India has been working toward a breakthrough like this for a long time. Its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called hydroelectric dams, steel plants, and research institutes the 'temples of modern India'.
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In 2015, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi announced a 'Make in India' policy. Since 2020, his government has committed $26 billion to subsidising strategic manufacturing goals.
India's most urgent reason for developing industry is to create jobs. Unlike the US, it does not have enough: not in services, manufacturing or anything else. Nearly half of its workers are involved in farming. With India's population peaking, it needs about 10 million new jobs a year just to keep up.
It also wants to achieve the kind of financial power and technological autonomy that China found as it became the factory of the world.
One problem is that India's electronics factories still import the most valuable of the 1,000 components that go into a finished iPhone, like chips and camera modules. Sceptics disparage India's success with the final assembly of iPhones as 'screwdriver work,' complaining that too little of the devices' value is made in India.
But the government, dangling subsidies, is persuading companies like Apple to source more of those parts locally. It is already getting casings, specialised glass and paints from Indian firms. Apple, which opened its first Indian stores two years ago, is required by the Indian government to source 30 per cent of its products' value from India by 2028.
Indo-MIM, an Indian company with a US-born boss, is the kind that contributes to the neighbourhood forming around Apple's production and also benefits from it. At a plant near Devanahalli, in southern Karnataka state, Indo-MIM's engineers perform metal-injection moulding for hundreds of companies worldwide. It makes parts for aircraft, luxury goods, medical devices and more.
The company is already making jigs or brackets for use in the Foxconn plant. In addition, a 'critical mass' of speciality firms means that Indo-MIM no longer needs to make many of the tools it uses to make its products, said Krishna Chivukula, its chief executive.
'You don't want to have to make everything yourself,' he said, adding that it means Indo-MIM can concentrate on what it does best.
Chivukula said the workforce made Devanahalli fertile ground for factories. 'The people here are very hungry,' he said. 'They're looking for opportunity, and then on top of that, millions of them are engineers.'
Still, despite the surplus of engineers, companies are bringing in talent from East Asia. Prachir Singh, an analyst for Counterpoint, said it had taken 15 years to figure out what would work in China and five years to import this much of it to India.
Centum is an Indian-origin contract manufacturer, like Foxconn is to Apple. Centum makes circuit boards that go into products like air-to-air missiles, forklifts and fertility scanners. Nikhil Mallavarapu, its executive director, said the company was in talks to customise testing equipment for the Foxconn factory.
Newly hired engineers and other professionals are pouring into the area. Many moved hundreds of miles while others must commute hours a day to get to work. Some rise at 3:30 am to make the 8am shift.
But India is thick with people. A five-minute walk away, a village called Doddagollahalli looks the same as it did before Foxconn landed. Nearly all the houses clustered around a sacred grove belong to farming families growing millet, grapes and vegetables.
Some villagers are renting rooms to Foxconn workers. Many more are trying to sell their land. But Sneha, who goes by a single name, has found a job on the Foxconn factory's day shift. She holds a master's degree in mathematics. She can walk home for lunch every day, a corporate lanyard swinging from her neck.
It is people like Sneha, and the thousands of her new colleagues piling into her ancestral place, who make Foxconn's ambitions for India possible. Trump wants to revive the fortunes of left-behind US factory towns, but the pipeline of qualified young graduates is not there.
Josh Foulger has recruited lots of motivated Indian workers like Sneha. He heads the electronics division of Zetwerk, an Indian contract manufacturer with factories in Devanahalli that sees itself as a smaller competitor to Foxconn. He said he routinely got 700 job applications a year from local tech schools. It is a matter of scale: Karnataka state alone, he said, has a population half the size of Vietnam's.
All of India's 'states are very keen on getting manufacturing,' said Foulger, who grew up in southern India and made his home in Texas before moving back to India, where he set up shop for Foxconn. India has jobs for engineers and managers and all the way down the ladder. 'Manufacturing does a very democratic job' of meeting the demand for good jobs, he said.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times
.
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