A factory complex in Sriperumbudur, an industrial town in India, in Tamil Nadu state, is one of Apple’s most important iPhone assembly hubs outside of China. It is operated by Foxconn, a Taiwan-based electronics manufacturing company. TIME takes a look inside.
Three times per day, the gates to this factory open to swallow buses ferrying thousands of workers—around three-quarters of them women. These workers spend eight hours per day, six days per week, on a humming assembly line, soldering components, turning screws, or operating machinery. The factory is one of the biggest iPhone plants in India, with some 17,000 employees who churn out 6 million iPhones every year. And it’s fast expanding.
Most of the 232 million iPhones Apple sold in 2022 came from factories in China, with many of them originating from a single massive Foxconn facility in Zhengzhou. But shifting geopolitical tides have recently forced Apple to re-evaluate its exposure to China. First came the pandemic, when Beijing’s harsh lockdowns badly disrupted global supply chains. Now U.S. intelligence assessments, made public this year, say that Chinese President Xi Jinping has instructed his military to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027… A hot war with China could have disastrous consequences, not only for the world, but also for Apple’s ability to manufacture many of the products behind its $2.7 trillion business.
Powering Apple’s pivot to India is Foxconn. By 2024, Foxconn hopes to nearly quadruple its production at this South Indian factory to 20 million iPhones per year, and reportedly plans to hire tens of thousands more workers to make that possible. Satellite images provided to TIME by Planet Labs show rapid expansion at the complex, with three new factory buildings constructed over the past two years and newly broken ground on space large enough to accommodate at least three more. Apple could manufacture 25% of all iPhones in India by 2025, up from just 5% in 2022, according to a JPMorgan analysis.
MacDailyNews Take: The most telling line from this wannabe “exposé” is this: “The four workers at the Sriperumbudur factory who spoke to TIME said that while it’s unlikely they would easily find higher wages elsewhere, they still feel they deserve better.”
Every worker anywhere on the planet feels “they deserve better.” It’s simply human nature.
Via Foxconn and other assembler/suppliers, Apple works in, and with, countries with far lower standards of living and far lesser worker protections vs. the U.S. and Europe and inexorably builds up workers rights, benefits, and pay increases. It happened in China. It’s now starting to happen in India, Vietnam, etc.
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Only time will tell if Apple’s Indian factories can maintain the same extremely high level of quality and dependability that Apple has been able to depend on from their Chinese factories.
Let’s hope so, because it has been foundational to Apple’s reputation.