It's not a secret that Apple considers India the next major market to push into. During Apple's latest Financial Conference Call, Apple's CEO Tim Cook stated the following: "Looking at the business in India, we set a quarterly revenue record and grew very strong double digits year over year. And so we feel very good about how we performed, and that was -- that's despite the headwinds that we've talked about. Taking a step back, India is hugely exciting market for us and is a major focus. We brought the online store there in 2020. We will soon bring Apple retail there. So we're putting a lot of emphasis on the market.

Apple is working with Foxconn that is expanding current plants and have two more plants on the drawing board. Yesterday Patently Apple posted a report that in part referenced Hon Hai's Chairman Liu Yangwei recently met with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi to show him the layout of their new Indian plant. Hon Hai plans to invest about US$700 million (equivalent to NT$21.623 billion) to build a new factory in India, near the airport in Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka, which may assemble Apple products.

On another front we're learning today, via Reuters, that Foxconn (owned by Hon Hai) has won an order to make AirPods for Apple and plans to build a factory in India to produce the wireless earphones.

The deal will see Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics maker and assembler of around 70% of all iPhones, become an AirPods supplier for the first time and underlines efforts by the key Apple supplier to further diversify production away from China. AirPods are currently made by a range of Chinese suppliers.

One source said Foxconn will invest more than $200 million in the new India AirPods plant in the southern Indian state of Telangana. It wasn't immediately clear how much the AirPods order would be worth.

A subsidiary, Foxconn Interconnect Technology Ltd plans to start construction of a manufacturing facility in Telangana in the second half of this year and begin production by the end of 2024 at the earliest. For more on this, read the full Reuters report.