Foxconn has bought a huge piece of land in suburban Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, the Taiwanese tech giant said in a stock filing on Tuesday, as Apple’s main supplier seeks to diversify its production outside of China.
The acquisition of 1.2 million square meters in Devanahalli, near Bangalore airport, the capital of the state of Karnataka considered India’s Silicon Valley, was announced in a statement to the London Stock Exchange.
Its subsidiary Foxconn Hon Hai Technology India Mega Development bought the site for 3,000 million rupees (33.55 million euros).
The group said in the same document that another Foxconn unit was in the process of acquiring rights to use a 480,000-square-meter piece of land in Vietnam’s Nghe An province.
Going by the official name of Hon Hai Precision Industry, Foxconn is the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and the leading assembler of iPhones.
The giant has been manufacturing Apple devices in India since 2019, in a factory located in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
alternative to china
Both companies are looking to diversify their business outside of China, where most of their production is located, given last year’s strict Covid policies and ongoing diplomatic tensions with the United States that have hurt production.
Karnataka state chief minister Basavaraj S. Bommai announced in March that Apple would “soon” make iPhones at a new factory in the state, creating “around 100,000 jobs.”
In the same month, Bloomberg News reported, citing anonymous sources, that Foxconn planned to invest $700 million in a new factory in Karnataka.
According to a statement from the group in March, Young Liu, the president of Foxconn, had visited the state to “deepen partnerships…and seek cooperation in new areas such as semiconductor and electric vehicle development.”
He also met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said the “discussions” had “covered various topics aimed at strengthening India’s technology and innovation ecosystem.”
Two other Taiwanese groups, Wistron and Pegatron, manufacture and assemble devices of the American brand in India.
Source: BFM TV
