I'm honestly surprised that Apple didn't choose Vietnam or Indonesia over India.
But that was at Amazon. At my current gig, the India based teams are great. Not quite up to the standards of the US teams, but I'm sure they're more cost effective. They're also hungry for more interesting responsibilities, and are proactively improving things. It makes me think that Amazon just had shitty management over there.
There are some Apple products already being made in Vietnam. I believe that some iPhone work is going there soon, as well.
India of late has a capricious regulation problem which makes it difficult for tech firms to have predictability.
And everyone already knows you can get decent quality manufacturing done in Vietnam. India would like to be considered in that same group.
Therefore it's in Apple's interest to present India with the opportunity to demonstrate that capability, while giving Apple a measure of leverage in cases where India's government is considering outlawing encryption or unmoderated forums or the shift key or whatever they think will make people stop complaining about them today.
https://www.investopedia.com/apple-moves-production-vietnam-...
I imagine once Apple is confident they will likely add more products there.
Not exported outside the middle east and India.
Looks like they sold 5 of them in Europe in 2016.
https://carsalesbase.com/europe-tata/#:~:text=Tata%20cars%20....
Hyundai does some design work in India and manufacturing (i20) but hardly any exported, and for the domestic market.
Mahindra is probably doing the most exports, at a guess
Very durable and value for money.
> At an iPhone casings factory in Hosur run by Indian conglomerate Tata, one of Apple’s suppliers, just about one out of every two components coming off the production line is in good enough shape to eventually be sent to Foxconn, Apple’s assembly partner for building iPhones, according to a person familiar with the matter.
I'm not sure the code shipped by the offshored programmers I've interacted with built 50% of the time.
Something like 90% of "software engineers" in the country are considered unfit for software engineering [0] [1]
[0] https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/jobs/only-6-of-those-pa...
The offshore employees were, on aggregate, no better or no worse than their US counterparts. They were carefully recruited by a dedicated team, and all ended up with solid institutional knowledge because they were valued and retained over their careers. They even had decent advancement paths as well, including into management - I remember one guy in the office whose reporting chain went from him to Hyderabad - USA - Bangalore - USA. That had to be fun.
But then the outsourcing bug bit, teams were decimated in both countries, and that’s when I got to see the typical horror stories firsthand.
I’m careful now to ask people who talk about “offshoring” if they mean building a team of FTEs in another country, or hiring a body shop with the lie that they’ll handle the “non-core business tasks”.
Here is one book that goes into some detail:Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma
Many children lost their lives in Gambia and Uzbekistan after consuming tainted cough syrup made in India. The worst part is not the error, it is the fact that indian regulators and the indian government don't do anything to solve the problem.
Weirdly, it doesn't seem like a regulatory requirement to print the country of manufacture on the box. All of our food is clearly labelled but not pharmaceuticals? An odd omission.
I speak as someone who worked in India -- Bangalore, in the IT sector -- for 2 years. I loved the place and the people. But for sure the work ethic is ... different to Australia.
Instead, greed and crony capitalism takes over and increasingly, the indian government is getting increasingly involved, reacting to any criticism in a churlish manner.
Really sad to see the wasted potential in a country like India. I suspect this is cultural and not easy to fix.
That might not be palatable but it's true.
My mate Kiran used to lament the state of his own country. "The corruption..." he would sigh.
It's the opposite in the US, for the most part.
During a visit to a facility of leading Indian drugmaker Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd last year, U.S. inspectors found that a black fiber embedded in a tablet may have been a hair from an employee’s arm, according to documents seen by Reuters. ....
The Mohali plant, in the northern state of Punjab, had not been making U.S. exports since last November, when it voluntarily recalled its generic version of cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor in the United States due to the potential presence of glass particles in certain batches.
Here's another case from last year:
A parliamentary committee in Gambia said on Tuesday that India-based drug maker Maiden Pharmaceuticals Ltd was responsible for the deaths of at least 70 children from acute kidney injury and called on the government to pursue legal action.
According to a WHO report, "labs contracted by it in Ghana and Switzerland found excess levels of ethyleneglycol and diethyleneglycol contaminants in the Maiden syrups."
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/gambia-lawmakers-say-ma...
Note that the plant cited in the 2013 case was majority owned by a Japanese pharmaceutical company. They still couldn't get QC right.
That said, India does produce massive amounts of pharma for export around the world. Just read the labels on the boxes in the drug stores.
I understand it's also a culture issue. India has a culture of never telling clients "no" for anything, even if they know they can't do it. So you ask for something insanely complex, and your contractor in India will throw a mountain of buggy code at you. I wouldn't be surprise if that's also the issue here.
Cross-cultural communication is an actual field of study, you know? But in this case, with the unwillingness to say "no", it's a killer. We ended up cutting them loose because even though they were cheaper per hour than US-based resources, we couldn't make the progress we needed to make. One US dev because 3, and that became a whole team, and that's how we decided to continue.
It's precisely a software outsourcing location because they are unable to produce anything of value by themselves.
This is only partially true.
India has factories that provide inter-mediate parts required for creating final product. For example, a car needs axles, engine, dashboard plastics, alloy for body, brakes and electronics. You are more likely to find an Indian name in top-10 vendors for above parts sorted by marketshare. With the exception of engine, transmission, they have expanded.
What it does lack is tack of exporting finished products such as iPhone or smartphone or cars or jets. And I think this will be a long process. Someone with deep pockets like Apple is willing to bet and here we are.
1. https://wap.business-standard.com/article/companies/pv-expor...
Also wrong on chip fabs, there are no commercial high scales fabs but govt owned or small scale ones.
India, despite it's reputation as a software outsourcing location has never been able to produce exportable quality besides textiles. There are no cars or electronics, or chip fabs in this country.
The author's description of the government being 'bureaucratic' is a nice way of saying corrupt, and certainly has no direct bearing on manufacturing yields. That's simply the way business is done in a largely domestic economy.