Key iPhone manufacturing partner Foxconn bets big on India's Telangana

(Image credit: Future)

Foxconn is set to invest as much as $500 million in the southern Indian state of Telangana. The investment will see new manufacturing plants come online with thousands of new jobs to be created.

Foxconn is one of Apple's most important manufacturing partners and continues to move more manufacturing capacity away from China — a move that Apple has been championing since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing lockdowns in the country that affected production.

It's also reported that Foxconn has spent an additional $37 million on land in Bengaluru as part of the Indian expansion.

25,000 jobs

TechCrunch reports that K.T. Rama Rao, Telangana’s IT minister, says that the investment will see Foxconn become home to 25,000 jobs in the first phase of the move.

Demonstrating the “Telangana Speed”, I am happy to announce the groundbreaking of first of Foxconn’s plants in Telangana at Kongar Kalaan todayWith an investment of over $500M it shall create 25,000 direct jobs in first Phase #Telangana #Foxconn pic.twitter.com/PHThJWxsfTMay 15, 2023

Foxconn already builds some iPhones in the country and has signed a deal that will see it produce Apple's AirPods wireless earbuds in the country as well. Foxconn is far from the only company that has sought to take advantage of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s financial incentives with Pegatron and Wistron two others getting involved.

It isn't yet clear whether Foxconn intends to build Apple's best iPhones in the new facility, but having one Chinese factory be the only one capable of producing iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max (located in Zhengzhou) has so far caused production issues thanks to the aforementioned lockdowns. Apple warned customers towards the end of 2022 that stock shortages could be directly attributed to issues at the plant dubbed iPhone City by some. It also isn't clear how much pressure Apple has put on Foxconn to expand its Indian manufacturing capacity.

As for Foxconn, it's had a presence in India since 2006 and looks set to continue to increase that presence in the years to come — hopefully, that'll make it easier to buy iPhones in the future, too.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.