Apple’s plan to shift its manufacturing from China to India has been fraught with challenges, including an unacceptable yield rate.
According to a report published in the Financial Times, Apple has sent a number of its top engineers and product designers from California and China to factories in southern India to train up factory workers and build production lines.
However, since last September, when Chinese production was halted by the country’s zero-COVID policy, and a number of riots and breakouts in its iPhone factories in Zhengzhou, Indian factories have been thrown into the deep end, being responsible for building the iPhone 14 flagships that usually come out of China.
While the lower-end iPhones have been coming out of India since 2017, this marked the first time they dealt with the higher-end models.
The FT report found that at a casings factory in Hosur, only one out of every two components were good enough to be shipped to Foxconn for assembly. Considering Apple aims for an 100 per cent yield rate, this isn’t pleasing the Californian giant.
