As per a recent report by the Economic Times, Tata Group is in negotiations with the Taipei-based company to purchase its manufacturing facility in Karnataka for between Rs 400 and Rs 5000 crore. Winston is one of Apple’s top three suppliers in India. If the agreement were to go through, the purchase would help Tata increase the capacity for producing precision engineering at the group company Tata Electronics Pvt Ltd. (TEPL).
In order to become a significant producer of mobile phone components and convince companies like Apple to invest in India rather than China, TEPL was established. In addition to being an existing supplier to Apple, TEPL intends to work with other OEMs. In Hosur, Tamil Nadu, there is a Tata electronics complex.
According to a Bloomberg article from September, Tata was reportedly seeking to work with Winstron to create a joint venture for the manufacture of electronics.
“Tatas will run the show, but Wistron may keep a small share to leverage on the global vendor ecosystem of Apple. There is a sense that Apple wants to bring down its dependency on Wistron over the next few years due to a variety of reasons. Players like Tata want to capitalise on that,” a source reveled to Economic Times while in anonymity.
Only Winstron, Pegatron, and Foxconn now produce iPhones for Apple in India. According to JP Morgan reports, Apple may be considering moving 25% of its iPhone production to India by 2025. If the Tata-Winstron agreement were to go through, India would likely overtake China as the world’s largest producer of iPhones.
