Apple's Taiwanese cable supplier to establish cable manufacturing units in India

While India has been looking to attract electronic manufacturers from abroad under its production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, in a big announcement on October 24, Taiwan-based cable and connector maker Apple Inc. said it will establish its plant to manufacture cables in India later this year. Cheng Uei Precision Industry Co. Ltd said in a statement that it will start mass production for Apple Inc. in its new Indian plant in order to boost its presence in the South Asian country, sources of Canadian broadcaster BNN Bloomber confirmed, citing the Taiwanese tech giant’s intentions of moving base to India over China due to mounting US-China trade tensions.

The Taiwanese tech giant Cheng Uei Precision Industry Co., Ltd. is an affiliate with the US’ Foxlink International, Inc. The company is following in the footsteps of its Taiwanese counterpart Foxconn Technology Group that earlier, in 2017, invested $5 Bn in India to establish a manufacturing hub parallel to China, which has been instrumental for export to markets across Europe and the US. With the implementation of GST, the firm enhanced Indian operations in an “exponential manner.” Not only Foxconn and recently Cheng Uei but Apple Inc.’s other two major assembly partners, namely Pegatron Corp. and Wistron Corp., have both set up subsidiary and iPhone assembly plant in India earlier.

Meanwhile, according to BNN Bloomberg’s sources, the chairman of Cheng Uei, also known as Foxlink, is T.C. Gou, is the brother of Foxconn founder Terry Gou. This has largely governed the company’s decision to move its Apple cable manufacturing to India instead of China in midst of political tensions between the US companies and China under the administration of US President Donald Trump. 

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60,000 Chinese workers replaced by AI

In another incident that led to the Cheng Uei Precision Industry Co. Ltd’s decision to establish the manufacturing plant in India with Indian employees by 2020 end is the recent reports of a Chinese national engineer who was caught on CCTV surveillance camera damaging the automation equipment at a Chennai plant. The incident was reported to the Chinese authorities, according to internal sources that informed BNN. Further, as many as thirty-five Taiwanese companies, including Apple’s supplier Foxconn, axed over 60,000 jobs in a Chinese factory in a 4 billion yuan (HK$4.74 billion) project that installed AI instead, Chinese county Kunshan government’s publicity department informed state-run South China Morning Post. 

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