Apple presses India for incentives to assemble iPads locally

Industry sources say Apple plans to increase its iPad production in India, and that it is lobbying the local government to increase incentives for it and other technology firms.

Following previous claims that Apple is increasing iPhone production in India, the company is now looking to do the same with iPads. To increase iPad production, Apple is lobbying for an increase in the Indian government's new technology incentive plans.

According to Reuters, Apple's Indian partners, such as Wistron, benefited from a similar incentive in 2020. Prime Minister Narendra Modi then launched a $6.7 billion incentive to boost smartphone assembly.

Now the government plans a performance-linked incentive that returns money to manufacturers, based on their exports of devices from India. The new incentive is expected to launch at the end of February 2021 and be capped at 70 billion rupees ($964.5 million) over five years.

Apple and other firms are reportedly pressing for that incentive to be increased to a cap of 200 billion rupees ($2.74 billion).

Separately, Reuters reports that New Delhi authorities are also planning a similar incentive scheme, specifically to boost production of wearables such as smartwatches. This scheme is expected to provide companies with 50 billion rupees ($687 million) over five years.

Apple's partner companies in India include Wistron, which assembles iPhones in its plant at Narasapura. Wistron would benefit from such incentives, however Apple continues to have the company on probation since the India factory riot in December 2020.

Apple has not commented.

4 Comments

The_New_tonton 4 Years · 37 comments

About 3 years ago

Every single responsible company should have a solid plan in place to divest from China. Bravo Apple for starting to catch up to Samsung on this.

fred1 11 Years · 1134 comments

I’ve wondered for a long time why there isn’t more manufacturing in India, especially with so much of the population speaking English. It looks like now the government there is doing something about it.

lkrupp 19 Years · 10521 comments

fred1 said:

I’ve wondered for a long time why there isn’t more manufacturing in India, especially with so much of the population speaking English. It looks like now the government there is doing something about it.

Isn’t it amazing that even the most liberal, one-world-government politicians are beginning to see China as a problem. Too bad Chinese technology is now embedded firmly in our lives. Imagine a single party, non-democratic , totalitarian regime controlling our existence because of our addiction to technology.

And there’s the factoid that Pegatron is a Taiwanese company operating on an island that China considers to be part of its homeland territory. What would the western democracies do if China were to invade Taiwan and reclaim it? Same thing they did when Hitler invaded the Sudetenland? Nothing?

tzeshan 14 Years · 2350 comments

lkrupp said:

fred1 said:

I’ve wondered for a long time why there isn’t more manufacturing in India, especially with so much of the population speaking English. It looks like now the government there is doing something about it.

Isn’t it amazing that even the most liberal, one-world-government politicians are beginning to see China as a problem. Too bad Chinese technology is now embedded firmly in our lives. Imagine a single party, non-democratic , totalitarian regime controlling our existence because of our addiction to technology.

And there’s the factoid that Pegatron is a Taiwanese company operating on an island that China considers to be part of its homeland territory. What would the western democracies do if China were to invade Taiwan and reclaim it? Same thing they did when Hitler invaded the Sudetenland? Nothing?

Is your history good? Japan invaded China and western democracies did nothing. Hitler rose because he wants to make Germany great again. Hitler is strongly anti-communism. He won western support including Ford and Churchill. Western democracy tried to hide this history.

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