Apple Inc assembly partner Pegatron Corp (和碩) is making preparations for its first plant in India, adding to a large influx of foreign tech investments in the country this year.
Last month, the Indian government set out a US$6.6 billion plan to woo the world’s top smartphone manufacturers, offering financial incentives and ready-to-use manufacturing clusters.
Pegatron is now setting up a local subsidiary and joining fellow Taiwanese electronics assemblers Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) and Wistron Corp (緯創), who have already been making some iPhone handsets in southern India.
With a number of factories in China, Pegatron is the second-largest iPhone assembler and depends on Apple for more than half of its business. Like its peers, it would set up in the south of India, said a person familiar with its plans who asked not to be named.
Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), and Wistron are looking to expand their operations in the country, and Pegatron’s entry could be seen as a defensive move to protect its share of budget iPhone manufacturing, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matthew Kanterman said.
Pegatron could uphold its iPhone SE assembly market share, which might have grown from a 50-50 split with Hon Hai, Kanterman said.
India offers a vast pool of skilled labor as well as a domestic market of a billion mobile connections. Only about half of those are smartphones, leaving untapped potential that is attractive to growth-hungry global brands like Apple, Samsung Electronics Co, Xiaomi Corp (小米) and Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp (歐珀).
For assemblers like Pegatron, exports would also be an enticing opportunity, especially at a time of worsening trade relations between Washington and Beijing making it imperative to have a diverse geographic base.
Smartphones are a focal point for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-touted Make in India program. Indian Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad has said the goal is for brands and manufacturers to transport the entire supply chain to the country, not just the end-stage assembly.
Quoted by local media, Prasad said India wants not only the “bridegroom” but also the “wedding procession.”
India would become a global manufacturing hub for both components and the complete assembly of smartphones and other devices, said Pankaj Mohindroo, chairman of the Indian Cellular & Electronics Association.
The group’s three dozen members include Apple, Hon Hai, Google, Wistron, Oppo and others.
“The focus is shifting from making for India to exports and the $400 billion electronics manufacturing that India is targeting by 2025 will be dominated by exports,” Mohindroo said by telephone from New Delhi.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
WEAKER ACTIVITY: The sharpest deterioration was seen in the electronics and optical components sector, with the production index falling 13.2 points to 44.5 Taiwan’s manufacturing sector last month contracted for a second consecutive month, with the purchasing managers’ index (PMI) slipping to 48, reflecting ongoing caution over trade uncertainties, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The decline reflects growing caution among companies amid uncertainty surrounding US tariffs, semiconductor duties and automotive import levies, and it is also likely linked to fading front-loading activity, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “Some clients have started shifting orders to Southeast Asian countries where tariff regimes are already clear,” Lien told a news conference. Firms across the supply chain are also lowering stock levels to mitigate
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
RESHAPING COMMERCE: Major industrialized economies accepted 15 percent duties on their products, while charges on items from Mexico, Canada and China are even bigger US President Donald Trump has unveiled a slew of new tariffs that boosted the average US rate on goods from across the world, forging ahead with his turbulent effort to reshape international commerce. The baseline rates for many trading partners remain unchanged at 10 percent from the duties Trump imposed in April, easing the worst fears of investors after the president had previously said they could double. Yet his move to raise tariffs on some Canadian goods to 35 percent threatens to inject fresh tensions into an already strained relationship, while nations such as Switzerland and New Zealand also saw increased
RSS