Foxconn to quadruple iPhone factory workforce in India

Foxconn is reportedly planning to greatly increase iPhone in India, quadrupling its workforce over the next two years.

Faced with a severe hit to its revenues because of China's COVID lockdown measures, Foxconn was already moving iPhone production to India. According to Reuters, however, it currently has approximately 17,000 workers in India, and it intends to raise that to 70,000 by 2024.

By comparison, Foxconn reportedly employs around 200,000 workers at its Zhengzhou plant in China. However, workers have been fleeing that factory because of alleged conditions there.

Neither Foxconn nor Apple has commented on the move to India, but Reuters claims the information comes from two anonymous Indian government officials.

Foxconn originally opened a plant in India in 2019, but it's not known whether the facility can be expanded sufficiently, or whether a new factory needs to be built.

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13 Comments

rob53 3252 comments · 13 Years

About 1 year ago

The employee numbers demonstrate the inability of the US to provide enough people to staff high tech manufacturing facilities. Amazon employees a lot of people but I don’t see enough extra (willing) people to compete with even one Chinese facility much less than the multitude needed to staff high tech companies along with all the other manufacturing facilities used to provide products for the US and the rest of the world.

imnotarobot 5 comments · 4 Years

We don't “provide” people. That’s why.

dewme 5376 comments · 10 Years

rob53 said:

The employee numbers demonstrate the inability of the US to provide enough people to staff high tech manufacturing facilities. Amazon employees a lot of people but I don’t see enough extra (willing) people to compete with even one Chinese facility much less than the multitude needed to staff high tech companies along with all the other manufacturing facilities used to provide products for the US and the rest of the world.

Exactly. China and India combined have nearly 10 times the population of the US so there is a raw numerical advantage that cannot be overlooked. So yeah, the notion of moving anything beyond a small fraction of the number of offshore manufacturing operations that it world take to maintain the status quo in terms of manufacturing capacity back to the US is unlikely to change the onshore-vs-offshore balance much at all.

From a raw number of jobs standpoint both sides could have all of the tech jobs they can possibly handle even at current levels and discounting growth. It’s not even close to being a zero sum game where one side is taking away from the other, at least when you look at the global market. If you divide the market up into something like domestic versus global I suppose the US could try to control a larger percentage of its domestic market while largely sacrificing its ability to compete globally. The domestic manufacturing capacity limit puts a hard ceiling on the revenue and growth potential of domestic companies, which kind of flies in the face of capitalism.

My preferred approach would be to play both sides of the model, with domestic production at levels that ensure resiliency and availability in the face of worst-case economic and geopolitical conditions, Plan B, while global production helps to drive unbridled growth and profitability when everyone is getting along, Plan A. I’m not an economist, I’m an engineer, so I know this approach is way too simplified. But I also know from my experience in high availability systems that you always need a backup plan and system standing by and ready to step in if Plan A crashes. I don’t think the US could could come close to meeting the most minimal domestic demand, Plan B, if the global focused plan crashes and burns. As far as I know, we don’t have a Plan B. The China-to-India move is more like a Plan A-minus.