Last fiscal year, Apple produced iPhones worth about $7 billion in India, three times more than the year before, Bloomberg news agency reported on Thursday, citing people who were informed. In China, Apple had recently encountered greater difficulties because the People’s Republic’s once strict Covid lockdowns had paralyzed the locally producing contract manufacturers. In addition, the US government is exerting increasing pressure on the technology industry in China, for example by restricting high-tech chip exports to the country.
In addition, Apple’s main manufacturer Foxconn Technology is based in Taiwan, which sees the People’s Republic of China as its own territory – tensions around the island state off China’s east coast have recently increased. Apple is therefore expanding its manufacturing structure to include heavily populated India.
The group has its devices manufactured by contract manufacturers. Apple’s suppliers expanded their production lines in India at record speed last year, the report said. The group could produce the upcoming iPhone model series simultaneously in China and India for the first time in the fall, it said. By 2025, a quarter of the iPhones manufactured worldwide could then come from India. Apple declined to comment on the information to Bloomberg.
India is doing the rest to attract more Apple production, including government incentives for smartphone production. The iPhone manufacturers Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron as well as component suppliers such as Sunwoda, Avary, Foxlink and Salcomp have created a total of almost 50,000 direct jobs and an estimated 100,000 indirect jobs in India since August 2021, a spokesman for the Indian Ministry of Electronics told the German press agency earlier this year. In March, Foxconn announced plans to open a large manufacturing facility in Telangana state that is expected to create 100,000 jobs in ten years.
Apple will significantly expand its use of recycled raw materials by 2025
In two years, Apple wants to use raw materials such as cobalt or tin, some of which are obtained from conflict regions, only from recycling in many cases. By 2025, 100 percent recovered cobalt will be used in the batteries developed by the iPhone group. The magnets in the devices will then also consist entirely of rare earths from recycling, as Apple announced on Thursday. In addition, circuit boards developed by Apple should only be soldered from recycled tin and coated with recycled gold, it said.
The announcement is a big step towards the goal announced a few years ago of only using recycled material in the production of new devices at some point. Apple is already using recycled aluminum on a large scale.
When it comes to raw materials such as gold, tin or cobalt, the entire electronics industry is often criticized because the metals are often mined under risky and inhumane conditions. Apple had used supply chain controls for the past few years to monitor the origin of materials.
At the same time, the use of these raw materials from recycling was expanded. According to Apple, a quarter of the cobalt in Apple products came from recycled material last year, after 13 percent in 2021. In the case of rare earths, the recycling share increased from 45 percent to 73 percent within a year. For the metal tin, it was 38 percent last year.
Apple has robots that take apart old iPhones for recycling. According to earlier information from the group, almost 100 percent of the cobalt from the batteries can be reused for the production of new batteries. Apple also set itself the goal of completely eliminating plastic from its packaging by 2025.
On the NASDAQ, Apple shares rose 1.06 percent in places to $161.77.
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