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: @sihamese , @vindugoel , @bloombergquint , and @robert_fenner Tweets: Siham / @sihamese : foxconn is a taiwanese electronics manufacturing company (the biggest in the world of its kind) with total assets worth around 4 trillion yet giving their indian female employees 2 meals a deal, transportation to work & $130 a month salary for some is seen as “progress” for them. https://twitter.com/... Vindu Goel / @vindugoel : A peek inside life at Foxconn's India factories. https://www.bloomberg.com/... @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
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2015 talks to build Foxconn's first Apple plant in India took four years to become physical reality: this Bloomberg tour shows two operating plants in Andhra Pradesh, almost 15,000 workers — about 90% women — and iPhone X assembly beginning for domestic sale and future export.
The visit reads differently in hindsight. The two planned additional plants and the low-wage workforce (~$130/month with meals and transport) were the opening move of a "China plus one" strategy whose scale only became clear later: internal documents put India at $10B of Foxconn revenue by 2022, still just 4.6% of the total.
First-order effects
- Foxconn gains a second production geography outside China, with Andhra Pradesh plants assembling phones for multiple manufacturers and starting iPhone X work for Apple — its first India-based iPhone assembly.
- Roughly 15,000 mostly female Indian workers enter the electronics manufacturing workforce at wages around $130/month plus meals and transport, immediately raising labor-condition questions that follow the expansion.
Second-order effects
- Apple's supply chain gets a credible non-China node for iPhones, but the later record shows the friction cost: [[a:846787|iPhone 15 production in India ran into language barriers, labor disputes, and regulatory hurdles]], meaning diversification buys resilience at the price of yield and management overhead.
- Wage levels become a competitive variable across Foxconn's own sites — Chennai contract hires were later reported at ~$190–$225/month, well above the Andhra Pradesh baseline, pressuring internal pay consistency as hiring scales.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, India shifts from pilot site to structural pillar: the $2.5B Project Elephant factory near Bengaluru, Foxconn's second-largest outside China with 40,000 jobs, shows the buildout compounding into full-scale capacity rather than token assembly.
- The durable lesson is that "China plus one" is a decade-long capability transfer, not a relocation — even after years of investment, India remained under 5% of Foxconn revenue, so multi-country manufacturing grows by accretion while China stays the center of gravity.
The trend: Electronics contract manufacturing is slowly re-balancing from a China-centered model toward a multi-country footprint, with India's share growing through successive factory generations rather than any single shift.