Apple's CEO to meet with India's PM next week just as India is set to introduce new output incentive plans to lure Apple & others away from China
This morning Patently Apple posted a report about the two new retail stores opening in India next week. In that report we noted Apple's CEO will be meeting with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi whose government has been pushing for electronics manufacturing in his country and has offered billions of dollars in incentives to attract Apple's manufacturing partners like Foxconn Technology Group and Pegatron Corp.
The timing of the meeting is interesting considering that's it's also being reported this morning that India's Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that her country is seeking to be more involved in world supply chains and serve as an alternative to China through output-incentive plans.
India's production-linked incentive schemes covering 13 manufacturing sectors including for semiconductors “are bringing in global value chains into India,” Sitharaman said at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “By doing that, we hope to have production of many of these large, bulk-manufactured goods which can go from India” to meet both international and local demand, she said.
“It’s unrealistic to think that everything will get out of China,” Sitharaman said, adding firms have become prudent & are diversifying due to the supply chain disruptions in China, giving an opportunity to Asia’s third largest economy.
India last month laid out an ambitious target of hitting $2 trillion annually in overall exports by 2030 as the South Asian country makes a renewed push to become a top choice for companies shifting supply chains away from China.
On Monday, Sitharaman gave the example of "mobile-phone manufacturing — the Asian nation in 2014 produced very few devices and the industry had grown to become one of the world’s biggest exporters." Source
In late January Patently Apple posted a report titled "Apple has become the first tech company in India to export $1 Billion worth of smartphones in a month."
Over the weekend, Bloomberg reported that "Representative Mike Gallagher, the chairman of a House committee focused on US-China competition, met with Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Disney CEO Bob Iger as part of a three-day trip through California to learn more about how companies are navigating the tensions between the world’s two largest economies.
“Apple’s at the heart of what is the most complex aspect of this competition, which is companies that have a massive presence in China are going have to deal with the fact that some form of selective economic decoupling is inevitable,” Gallagher said in a phone interview. “It’s going to continue.”
The Biden administration has been working on a program that would restrict investments in some sectors of China’s economy and require reporting on other areas. Obviously with Mike Gallagher talking to Apple and Disney CEO's about economic decoupling with China is one of those restrictions in-the-works. All the more incentive for Apple to continue it's investments in India, Vietnam and elsewhere outside of China.
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