Apple begins making iPhone 14 in India at Chennai's Pegatron factory

Taiwanese electronics major Pegatron has started assembling Apple iPhone 14 in India, according to a report.

Pegatron’s new mobile phone manufacturing facility, set up under the Government of India’s (GoI) Production Linked Incentive scheme (PLI), in an industrial park in Chengalpattu near Chennai, Tamil Nadu, was inaugurated on September 30.

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Pegatron is the second Apple supplier to produce the iPhone 14 in India, people familiar with the matter said, declining to be identified as the manufacturing plan is not public, a Bloomberg News report said on Friday (November 4).

The move comes when Apple’s key iPhone Pro manufacturing hub in the China’s Zhengzhou – operated by Foxconn Technology Group – was placed under an abrupt Covid-19 lockdown by authorities. That situation put a spotlight on Apple’s deep reliance on China, though the India expansion was in line with diversification plans already in place, the people said, the report added.

Foxconn began making the iPhone 14 in India in September. Earlier, Pegatron was manufacturing iPhone 12 in India.

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Pegatron is the third Apple vendor to have set up a factory in India after Foxconn and Wistron. The firm has been running trial production of iPhone for the last six to nine months.

It was in 2017 that Apple commenced assembling iPhones in India through Wistron.

The company has committed to invest around ₹1,000 crore and produce mobile phones worth about ₹1 lakh crore in India under the PLI scheme.

As per the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Pegatron’s India subsidiary Pegatron India has committed an investment worth crores of rupees during the tenure of the PLI scheme and expected to generate thousands of direct jobs in the sector.

“Apart from Pegatron, Foxconn Hon Hai Technology India Mega Development Private Limited, Dell, Ascent Circuits, Bharat FIH have also committed crores of investments in Tamil Nadu under Centre’s PLI Scheme to ramp up their capacities to make in India for the World.

“The new Pegatron facility at Chengalpattu is expected to add to the momentum — both in terms of capacity and employment for the people of Tamil Nadu, which has emerged as one of the major electronics hardware manufacturing states, with 20% of India’s production,” the ministry had said in September.

As per the report, Cupertino, California-based Apple is seeking alternative production hubs amid a trade war between Washington and Beijing and tight enforcement of Xi Jinping’s Covid Zero policy in China.