Inside Foxconn's manufacturing facilities in India, where it operates two plants and has plans for two more as it looks to diversify its operations beyond China
On a steamy summer morning, dozens of buses pull up outside a cluster of low-slung, blue buildings in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Tweets: @bloombergquint , @robert_fenner , and @business Tweets: @bloombergquint : Foxconn's India plant employs almost 15,000 workers—about 90% of them women—and assembles phones for various manufacturers. Recently, workers began testing, assembling Apple's iPhone X, which will be sold first in India and eventually exported. Read: https://www.bloombergquint.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Robert Fenner / @robert_fenner : Great piece from @SarithaRai (a must follow for India tech) and @pelstrom about Apple's opportunity in India. Check Sari's Twitter thread for some extra photos. Meet the women making $130 a month who could help Apple make iPhones in India https://www.bloomberg.com/... via @technology @business : Meet the women making $130 a month who could help Apple make iPhones in India https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The talks to build Foxconn's first Apple plant in India date back to 2015; four years later that bet has materialized into two operating facilities, including an Andhra Pradesh site of nearly 15,000 workers — about 90% women — now testing and assembling the iPhone X for domestic sale first, export later.
What makes this plant visit newsworthy rather than routine is what it starts: Apple's flagship device being built outside China at volume. The later record shows both the payoff and the friction — India reached $10B of Foxconn's annual revenue, just 4.6% of its 2022 total, while iPhone 15 production there ran into language barriers, labor disputes, and regulatory hurdles.
First-order effects
- Apple gains a second production geography for its most important product, with the Andhra Pradesh line initially serving Indian domestic demand before turning to exports.
- Foxconn's India workforce — almost 15,000 strong and overwhelmingly female — becomes the operational core of its diversification beyond China, assembling phones for multiple manufacturers, not only Apple.
Second-order effects
- The labor model scales on contract terms: by late 2022 Foxconn was hiring roughly 10,000 contract workers in Chennai at roughly $190–$225 per month, showing how the footprint grows through flexible staffing rather than permanent hires.
- Rivals and component suppliers face pressure to establish their own Indian capacity to stay inside Apple's supply chain as assembly spreads, and Foxconn itself doubles down with Project Elephant, a $2.5B Bengaluru-area factory planned as its second-largest outside China.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 'China plus one' becomes a structural feature of consumer-electronics manufacturing — but the 4.6% revenue share shows diversification is a decade-scale rebalancing, not a quick substitution, with execution quality (labor relations, regulation, language) as the binding constraint.
- A matured Indian manufacturing base would give Apple pricing and geopolitical insulation across its supply chain, shifting bargaining power between assemblers, host governments, and the brand that directs where the work goes.
The trend: Consumer-electronics assembly is gradually redistributing from China toward India, with Apple's orders and Foxconn's factory build-out setting the pace.