Tata set to make iPhones in India
Tata Electronics will pay $125 million for the 100% indirect share in Wistron InfoComm Manufacturing (India) Private Limited, which has a facility in Kolar, near Bengaluru, where the Apple iPhones were being manufactured
Tata Electronics will become the first Indian company to make the Apple’s iPhones in the country, minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said citing a statement from Taiwan-based Wistron, whose board on Friday approved a stake sale to the Tata group.
Tata Electronics will pay $125 million for the 100% indirect share in Wistron InfoComm Manufacturing (India) Private Limited, which has a facility in Kolar, near Bengaluru,where the Apple phones were being manufactured.
“Now within just two and a half years, Tata Electronics will start making iPhones from India for domestic and global markets. Congratulations to the Tata team for taking over Wistron operations. Thank you, Wistron for your contributions, and great going for Apple in building a global supply chain from India with Indian companies at its helm,” Chandrasekhar said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
In a statement, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer said: “Wistron Corp held a Board of Directors meeting today and granted approval for its subsidiaries, SMS InfoComm (Singapore) Pte Ltd and Wistron Hong Kong Ltd to sign the Share Purchase Agreement with Tata Electronics Pvt Ltd (TEPL) for the sale of its 100 per cent indirect stake in Wistron InfoComm Manufacturing (India) Pvt Ltd (WMMI).”
The announcement follows those by Apple, Google and Samsung to manufacture their flagship phones in India, a boost for the government’s Make in India campaign to attract foreign companies to its factories.
“Practically 80% of the equipment used in 5G rollout is made in India,” the minister for electronics and information technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, told the media at the event. He also said that India-designed and manufactured telecom equipment is exported to 72 countries.
Vaishnaw also said that a study by the India Semiconductor Mission found that some of the most complex chips are designed in India today. “Our earlier estimate was that there are 50,000 people involved in the chip designing ecosystem but our study found that there are about 1,20,000 engineers designing chips in India,” he said.
“In typical telecom equipment, IPR is close to 40-50% value addition so the design is very important,” he said. Vaishnaw also said that manufacturing in India is no longer just about low-cost production but quality production with original intellectual property rights (IPR).
“Seven applications have been approved for the semiconductor PLI,” he said.
On the PLI scheme for IT hardware, he said, “It is progressing very well. Most people have found their local partners, they have found the places where they want to manufacture. We will soon have the approved list.”
On being asked whether it is possible to completely decouple from the Chinese supply chain, he said: “Entire complex manufacturing will have a complex value chain. … It will remain an interdependent, complex, entangled value chain as a nature of this industry. It means that we must keep on developing our capabilities and develop our own ecosystem partners.”
Earlier, Bharti Enterprises chairperson Sunil Bharti Mittal announced that the OneWeb’s satellite network portal site in Mehsana, Gujarat, would be ready next month. OneWeb is a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite company with 648 satellites, and offer communication services independent of local terrestrial infrastructure.
Satellite-based communication can prove to be crucial for connectivity in remote areas. Currently, telcos contribute a percentage of their revenue to the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) to allow for development of telecom infrastructure in rural and remote areas. However, terrestrial networks require a significant amount of physical infrastructure to be built unlike satellite communication.
For Airtel, most use cases imagined for OneWeb are B2B. 80% of the applications are designed for defence purposes while others include providing connectivity in remote areas for education purposes.
Jio too announced its Jio SpaceFiber which works on similar technology. The other major player seeking to make its mark in India is Elon Musk’s Starlink.
For OpenWeb’s site in Gujarat to be functional, the government will first have to allocate spectrum for satellite communication.
Currently, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is doing a public consultation on how the spectrum for space-based communication services should be allocated. The two possible options are auctioning of spectrum or administrative assignment of spectrum by the government.
Vaishnaw refused to offer a comment on how TRAI should consider this issue. “Let the TRAI consultation be done in the proper manner. We should not give comments and try to colour the entire TRAI process,” he said.
