Damage to its iPhone factory in the Indian state of Karnatakaia is much less than has been reported, Wistron Corp (緯創) said yesterday in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
A “preliminary” assessment of the damage from Saturday’s riot was between NT$100 million and NT$200 million (US$3.51 million and US$7.03 million), not the NT$1.67 billion that the Times of India reported on Monday, the contract electronics manufacturer said.
“On the topic of the violent unrest at our Narasapura plant, we are doing our best to recover from and assess the damage. The main production equipment and warehouses have not been as seriously damaged as reported,” Wistron said.
Photo: AFP
“We are working with local police and talking with our insurers,” it said.
The company declined to provide further information beyond what it said in the filing.
Footage uploaded to Twitter shows people breaking windows and equipment at the new iPhone plant in the Narasapura industrial area in Karnataka, while the BBC reported that “hundreds” of people were involved.
While the Times of India on Sunday said that the rioters were employees angry over a wage dispute, Wistron on Monday said that they were “unknown individuals,” and reiterated its commitment to following local labor laws to “maximize the benefits to our workers.”
At the Legislative Yuan in Taipei yesterday, Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua (王美花) told lawmakers that Taiwan’s economic representatives in India were in “intensive contact” with Wistron and would “extend support as needed by the company.”
Asked if the government would utilize a bilateral investment agreement (BIA) with India over the incident, she said that the agreement “does not apply.”
“This is an individual incident. We are not at a place where it is suitable to call upon the BIA,” Wang said.
The Indian government was “immediately responsive” to the incident, she said.
However, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wen Yu-hsia (溫玉霞) urged the government to “get tough.”
“We encouraged our people to invest in India. We have signed a BIA with India, and now this kind of thing happened,” Wen said. “The government needs to get tough and support Wistron in negotiations with the Indian government.”
Morgan Stanley analysts Howard Kao (高燕禾) and Sharon Shih (施曉娟) yesterday said that the impact on Wistron would be limited for the time being.
“However, we plan to monitor the situation closely — key factors will be the length of the production halt, possible changes in Wistron’s relationship with Apple after this incident, and the progress of Wistron’s phase 2 capacity expansion,” they wrote in a research note.
The plant had started production just a few months ago, with a capacity for just 5 million to 10 million iPhones per year, they said.
It is Wistron’s second production site in India and handles older phones, rather than the latest iPhone 12, they added.
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