The Indian makers of a US$4 smartphone hope its low price will allow millions of poor people to own a mobile phone in a market with only 10 percent penetration.
However, labor rights campaigners worry that the push to churn out cheap handsets and tablets might lead to greater abuse of workers’ rights in India, the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market.
Ringing Bells Pvt Ltd’s Freedom 251 smartphone is to cost 251 rupees (US$3.72) — possibly the cheapest Android smartphone in the world.
On Thursday, CEO Mohit Goel said the first shipment of about 200,000 handsets was due next week.
Ringing Bells pays fair wages to its workers, and its pricier models will help offset the cost of the US$4 smartphone, he added.
“Our vision is to make mobile phones more affordable to the millions of poor Indians who do not own one,” Goel said.
India sold 103 million handsets last year, an increase of 29 percent from the year before.
With only one in 10 Indians owning a mobile phone, there is enormous potential — much of it at the lower end of the market, where dozens of local and foreign brands are vying for customers.
However, the pressure to keep costs low is pushing manufacturers to pay low wages, rely on cheaper contract labor and insist on unpaid overtime, activists say.
“Responsibility of the supply chain and workers lies with brand companies,” said Gopinath Parakuni, secretary-general of Cividep, a workers’ rights campaign group. “Our regulations simply aren’t strong enough to ensure workers in the electronics industry are taken care of.”
While most of the 100-odd mobile phone companies in India largely import from China and Taiwan, companies are increasingly heeding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to “Make in India,” an initiative launched in 2014 to emulate China’s export miracle.
Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp (小米) rolled out its first locally made smartphones last year from a facility in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
However, the "Make in India" drive to boost local manufacturing lacks sufficient checks and balances for millions of workers who face archaic labor laws, low wages, few benefits and little job security in businesses that often flout laws on safety or underage workers, activists say.
Not all efforts to produce cheap electronics have been successful.
In 2008, the Indian government unveiled a US$10 laptop that ended up costing more than US$100, while a US$20 Android tablet sold through a subsidy scheme failed to capture significant market share.
"Companies like to say cheap phones and computers is about digital empowerment and democracy, but we must stop and ask: 'What is the real cost of these cheap devices? Who pays the price?' Cheap is not always good," said Raphel Jose of the Center for Responsible Business in New Delhi.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts