Tatas close to taking over Apple supplier factory, to become 1st Indian iPhone maker, says report

A Bloomberg report says India’s largest conglomerate is in talks to acquire the Karnataka factory of Wistron Corp.

A private security guard stands at the exit gate of the headquarters of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in Mumbai | File Photo: Reuters

New Delhi: India’s largest conglomerate, the Tata Group, is close to acquiring a Taiwanese Apple Inc supplier’s factory, making it the first local company to assemble the premium phones, Bloomberg reported.

The report said the group would take over the Wistron Corp factory in Karnataka – valued at more than $600 million — as soon as August.

The two companies have been in negotiations for over a year, Bloomberg quoted people in the know. The facility employs more than 10,000 workers, who assemble the latest iPhone 14 model.

Wistron, which is exiting the iPhone business in India, was committed to ship iPhones worth at least $1.8 billion from the factory in the fiscal year through March 2024. The Tatas will honour those commitments.

“Wistron exported nearly $500 million in iPhones from India in the three months ended June 30, and Apple’s other key Taiwanese suppliers, Foxconn Technology Group and Pegatron Corp., have also ramped up locally,” the report said, adding that the move comes as Apple looks to “diversify away from China in the aftermath of the country’s Covid lockdowns and rising tensions between Washington and Beijing”.

The 155-year-old Tata Group has made significant inroads recently into the previously unexplored fields of electronics production and ecommerce. It already makes the iPhone chassis, or the metal backbone of the device.

Tata Sons Chairman N. Chandrasekaran said last December that the group was looking at manufacturing its own chipsets in India and was engaging with “multiple players”.

Nikkei Asia reported that “Tata’s move into chipmaking will break new ground for India, where the semiconductor market is set to more than double between 2021 and 2026 to $64 billion…”

Incidentally, Taiwan’s Foxconn — the global contract electronics maker – pulled out Monday of a semiconductor joint venture with Indian conglomerate Vedanta.

It had inked an agreement last year to build semiconductor and display production plants in Gujarat entailing an investment of about Rs 1.5 lakh crore.