In recent years, at Apple's request, Foxconn has fully transferred production capacity to India and built a large number of factories there, hoping to replace Chinese mainland as an OEM for iPhones. However, Apple's move may make Foxconn's efforts a joke, foreign media said that Apple is fully promoting automated production, and the factory transfer is only a stopgap measure.
Due to well-known reasons, Apple has been increasing its support for the Indian market in recent years, requiring foundries such as Foxconn and Luxshare Precision to invest in India to help India improve production capacity and employee quality. Foxconn actively responded to Apple's request, and publicly stated last year that "it is expected to increase the production capacity of iPhones made in India by 5 times in the next five years", and at least about 25% of the world's iPhones are produced in India.
In order to achieve the above goals, Apple invested an additional $1 billion in the Indian factory last year, or about 7.18 billion yuan, while Foxconn had to pay an additional $2.7 billion, or about 19.4 billion yuan, for this purpose. Such a large investment shows how determined Foxconn is to support India, on the one hand, it is to comply with Apple's requirements, on the other hand, it also values India's low labor costs, and believes that as long as it increases its efforts to support the Indian market, it will definitely be beneficial to Foxconn in the long run.
Just as the Foxconn author supported the Indian dream, Apple's operation caught it by surprise. According to foreign media reports, Apple officially decided to increase efforts to promote automation deployment, hoping to fully automate the assembly of iPhone buttons, receivers, speakers, logic motherboards and other components, and will also increase other automated production, the current iPhone assembly line has reduced the number of employees by 50%, and its assembly line continues to reduce manual participation under Apple's further promotion.
At present, the biggest problem of unmanned assembly is the yield problem, and Apple's test found that the cost of "high defect rate" remains high, so Apple does not dare to let the latest flagship mobile phones use all automated production, but Apple is making every effort to solve this problem. Once Apple's final yield rate improves, unmanned production will become the mainstream, and Foxconn's investment of tens of billions of yuan to support the Indian market has become a joke, because its most important labor cost is no longer an advantage, no matter how low the labor cost is, it is impossible to be cheaper than mechanized production of products. In the past few years, there will be no return on the support and investment in the Indian market, and Foxconn will not escape the curse of "India makes money and India spends, and wants to take it home".
In fact, unmanned factories are not a new topic for a long time, Xiaomi built an unmanned factory as early as 2020, also known as a black light factory, and now Xiaomi flagship mobile phones, a large part of the assembly tasks of Xiaomi cars are completed by mechanization, and there is basically no need for manual participation. In the future, unmanned production will become the mainstream of the industry, reducing manual participation to reduce costs, and improving product quality to avoid errors.
Friends, what do you think of Apple's promotion of unmanned assembly of iPhones, and Foxconn's support for India has become a joke?