Last September, news broke that India’s leading Tata Group was in talks with Wistron, and in November news broke that Tata wanted to buy Wistron’s only manufacturing plant in India for up to 50 billion rupees (currently about 4.195 billion CNY).
Business Line has now revealed that Wistron will complete the sale of its iPhone manufacturing plant in India to the Tata Group by the end of April.
In fact, Wistron is one of Apple’s largest suppliers in India, with a factory in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, where it has been assembling iPhones since 2017.
The official that Tata Group is the largest group of companies in India, including 7 divisions and 96 companies, operating in more than 40 countries on six continents, and exporting its products to 140 countries in the fields of aviation, automobiles, FMCG products, chemicals, defence aerospace, power distribution systems, engineering, finance, medical, information, railroad locomotives, real estate, steel, and telecommunications, communications, etc.
According to publicly available information, the Tata Group is named after its founder, Jamshedji Tata, whose family members have served as the group’s chairman for almost all of its existence. The chairman of the group during the transition period was Ratan Tata.
Wistron was one of the assemblers of Apple’s iPhone SE and iPhone 6s smartphones. Lixson Precision later announced that it would become Apple’s first mainland China OEM by acquiring part of Wistron’s iPhone business for $472 million.
Tata Group has been in talks with Wistron for months and hopes to complete the acquisition by the end of March this year, people familiar with the matter said. If the acquisition is successful, Tata would take over all eight iPhone production lines at Wistron’s India plant, as well as the plant’s 10,000 workers, including thousands of engineers. Wistron will continue to serve as a service partner for iPhone in India.
Now, foreign media are reporting that Tata Group will complete the acquisition of Wistron’s iPhone factory in India by the end of April. Sources said that Tata Group has already started organizational changes at the plant.
As part of the deal process, the factory may lay off about 2,000 workers, the sources said. In addition, 400 middle managers may also be laid off from the plant, while about four to five senior managers have already been laid off or are in the process of leaving the plant.
Presumably, the Indian conglomerate could produce the iPhone 15 for Apple after the Tata group’s acquisition. iPhone 12 and iPhone 14 are currently being produced on eight lines at Wistron’s India plant.
Of course, after Tata takes over the Bangalore plant, Wistron will be completely out of the Indian market, as it is the only plant in India that makes Apple products.
