The Indian conglomerate, Tata Group is in the final stage of talks with Apple’s supplier Wistron to buy out its factory based in Karnataka, India according to Bloomberg. This could happen as soon as August this year. The facility is estimated to be worth more than $600 million and employs more than 10,0oo workers to assemble the new iPhones like the iPhone 14.
The Tata group will honor Wistron’s commitment to ship iPhones worth $1.8 billion in order to get incentives from the local government and it also plans to triple the workforce by the upcoming fiscal year. All of the three parties have abstained from providing any comment on this matter.
The Cupertino-based tech giant is looking to diversify its supply chain out of China into South Asian countries to reduce its dependency on a single source. Wistron has reported more than $500 million in exports in the first quarter of the financial year 2023-24. Other than Wistron, Foxconn and Pegatron have also their local manufacturing units in India, and they also seemed to increase production locally.
In recent news, Apple was allegedly in talks with local bodies of India to introduce its credit card and Apple Pay in the country. The regulatory back of the country has denied giving any special treatment to Apple and told the company to go ahead with the usual procedure for launching a co-branded credit card. It is unclear whether the company wants to integrate Apple Pay with Unified Payments Interface (UPI) like Google did or if it will go with the regular tap-to-pay payments based on Near Field Communication (NFC).
