Tata Electronics Pvt Ltd (TEPL) is reportedly buying a majority stake in Taiwanese contract manufacturer Pegatron’s iPhone plant in India, strengthening its position as an Apple supplier.
TEPL will hold 60 per cent in the joint venture and take care of the plant’s daily operations. Pegatron will hold the rest and provide technical support, according to Reuters. The deal was announced internally last week.
The plant — Pegatron’s only plant in India — is located near Chennai. It has around 10,000 employees and makes five million iPhones annually.
Financial details of the deal were not available and there were no comments either from the Tata group or Pegatron.
Talks between the two have reportedly been going on since April and Pegatron is learnt to have the backing of Apple.
The tech giant, which is bullish on India, has been increasingly looking to diversify its supply chain beyond China, amid geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington.
The Pegatron plant will be the the third iPhone assembly plant of the Tatas: last year it took over the operations of Taiwanese company Wistron’s facility in Karnataka.
It is also building another plant at Hosur in Tamil Nadu, where it also has an iPhone component plant which was involved in a fire incident in September.
The plant is understood to have resumed operations in October.
Both Pegatron and TEPL are likely to seek the approval of the Competition Commission of India (CCI).
India growth
Apple has set an all-time revenue record in India and witnessed a double-digit growth in iPad sales in the country during the July-September 2024 quarter.
Close to $6 billion of India-made iPhones were exported in the first six months of this fiscal, with annual exports expected to cross the numbers of last year.
The Economic Survey of 2023-24 disclosed that Apple assembled $14 billion worth of iPhones in India during 2023-24, constituting 14 per cent of its global iPhone production.
``We also set September quarter segment revenue records in the Americas, Europe, and the rest of Asia Pacific, as well as in a large number of countries, including the United States, Brazil, Mexico, France, the UK, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and we continue to be excited by the enthusiasm we’re seeing in India, where we set an all-time revenue record,” Apple CEO Tim Cook had said during the company’s earnings call.
According to a Counterpoint Research report, Apple iPhone sales accounted for 21.6 per cent of market share in value terms in the September quarter in India.
