In a win for Apple, HP, and others, India is loosening its planned restrictions on imports of laptops, tablets and other IT hardware, giving manufacturers more time to prepare for potential curbs.
Sankalp Phartiyal for Bloomberg News:
The South Asian country is doing away with a compulsory licensing requirement for tech importers, and will instead only ask such companies to register under its so-called import management system, people familiar with the policy said. The system will start operating on Nov. 1, they said, asking not to be named as the matter isn’t public.
India is seeking to boost local production while trying to ensure sufficient availability of consumer electronics. The federal government last month shocked companies such as Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. as it announced a plan to curb laptop and tablet imports without a suddenly required license. A day later India’s trade regulator delayed the move by three months.
As part of the latest plan… the new rules won’t limit inbound shipments for about six to nine months, the people said.
A quota on imports could gradually kick in as companies begin to manufacture laptops, tablets and other hardware locally. The size of each company’s quota will depend on its local production, import of IT hardware as well as export of such products from India, the people said.
The planned new rules don’t apply to smartphones.
MacDailyNews Take: Giving companies some time to adjust before this plan kicks in should have been in place from its inception.
Apple is all in on India and we can see the company being granted exemptions or expedited licensing given that the company’s current push to diversify beyond China strongly involves significant manufacturing and assembly investments in India by Apple and their assemblers. – MacDailynews, August 8, 2023
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Caution! Control what you can control.
Things evolved in China that were never anticipated, that dangerously risked Apple’s continuous unimpeded supply of finished products.
We need to understand that when we spend $billions investing in production capacity and supply chain infrastructure in a foreign country, while we may have the best of intentions, there are many unknowns that are out of our ability to control. We should not expect the trajectory of a foreign government to align perfectly with our own.
When huge companies like Apple calculate the cost of manufacturing a product in a far away place, there are many factors other than the depressed wages of the foreign country to consider. Political decisions made by foreign countries simply cannot be controlled.
It is no longer the late 20th century when, if a country’s political decisions clashed seriously with our needs (think oil) we could count on the CIA to do whatever was necessary to bring about desired changes.
India is a sovereign nation that has national priorities that differ greatly from our own. Deep consideration of these uncontrollable factors can change the equation; simplistically deciding on manufacturing in a foreign location can have dangerous economic consequences.
For example, when Apple’s valuation recently, irrationally dropped 25 points, because of the malicious blabbing of certain vindictive Chinese politicians, Apple in effect lost a hundred billion dollars in value overnight! How much of the advantage of cheap Chinese labor did that, in effect, cancel?