Wistron Corp (緯創), an assembler of Apple Inc iPhones, yesterday approved a capital injection of US$33.5 million at its after-sales subsidiary in India so that it can build a smart devices plant for the Indian market.
“It will be Wistron’s first wholly owned plant in the country,” a Wistron investor relations official said by telephone.
Wistron has a coinvested smartphone plant with India’s Optiemus Infracom Ltd in the state of Uttar Pradesh with a production capacity of 600,000 smartphones per month.
The Uttar Pradesh plant’s clients include Taiwan’s HTC Corp (宏達電) and China’s Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp (歐珀移動), according to Indian media reports.
Wistron’s decision to expand its manufacturing capacity by setting up a wholly owned plant shows that it is optimistic about India’s growing domestic market.
The smartphone penetration rate is still less than 30 percent in India, making it one of the most attractive markets in the world, according to International Data Corp data.
The official said the wholly owned factory, which is to be in Bengaluru, is expected to become operational and enter mass production for a smart-devices client at the end of next quarter at the earliest.
However, the Wistron official said the company could not disclose the production capacity or the number of employees at the plant at client’s request, as it would reveal the scale of production.
KUNSHAN INVESTMENT
On the back of its growing smart devices business, Wistron’s board yesterday also approved a US$11.67 million expansion plan at the company’s smart devices factory in Kunshan, China.
The new plan comes only two months after the board agreed to invest US$2 million to purchase additional equipment for the Kunshan plant in September.
The official said the company would install new equipment to raise the production capacity this quarter.
Wistron expects its smart devices and liquid crystal modules (LCM) businesses, which contributed about 24 percent of its total revenue, to remain its main growth drivers this quarter, the official said.
The official said shipments by the company’s notebook business, which accounted for 40 percent of its total revenue, would decline by between 5 and 10 percent quarter-on-quarter due to the beginning of the traditional slow season.
Wistron’s net income plunged 22.07 percent year-on-year and 16.88 percent quarter-on-quarter to NT$512 million (US$16.1 million) last quarter, missing the market consensus estimate of NT$668 million.
The firm attributed the decline to a NT$338 million foreign-exchange loss due to the New Taiwan dollar’s appreciation against the US dollar.
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