Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India

When Chinese engineer Li Hai left the wintry cold of northern China and flew into the humid heat of Tamil Nadu in southern India, he had little idea what to expect.

It was early 2023. Months before the trip, a manager at the Foxconn iPhone factory where he worked had asked for volunteers to go on a temporary assignment to India. Li didn’t think long. He’d never traveled much, but was eager to. “I just wanted to go out and take a look,” Li told Rest of World, using a pseudonym because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Li is soft-spoken, sincere, and unassuming. He grew up in a rural part of China known for its steel mill industry, and had never strayed far. But what he lacked in his knowledge of the wider world, he made up for with curiosity.

Foxconn organized a brief training session on cultural sensitivity before his trip. There, Li was taught not to mention religion or politics, and to say “please” when speaking with his new Indian colleagues. “People from China might talk in a blunt way,” he said. “But when we talk with Indians, we should be more polite.”

Li worried most about food. On the eve of his departure, he packed his suitcase with diarrhea medication, packets of soup base to make his own Chinese hot pot, and — because he’d heard people in India ate with their hands — chopsticks.

Nervous but excited, Li carried his first passport on his first flight for his first trip abroad. The flight was a series of surprises: Turbulence, the diverse crowds in the Singapore airport where he had a layover, the cabin crew who addressed him in English.

His final destination was Sunguvarchatram, an industrial center on the outskirts of the state capital Chennai. The town sits at the heart of a global shift in electronics manufacturing currently underway.

Like many of its competitors, Apple has relied on China for assembling its products for years. But political and economic factors have forced the company, as well as the broader tech sector, to rethink that approach by seeking partners from across the region.

Foxconn — also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry — has been investing heavily in its iPhone factory in Sunguvarchatram. But with the factory’s higher material costs and a greater percentage of defective phones, the company has struggled to replicate the cutthroat efficiency it is known for, according to people familiar with the matter. As a result, the iPhones produced by Foxconn in Sunguvarchatram have always been less profitable than those made in China, two people close to the company told Rest of World. Foxconn did not respond to requests for comment.

Early this year, in an effort to improve production and ready the plant to manufacture Apple’s upcoming flagship iPhone 15, Foxconn dispatched more Chinese workers to Sunguvarchatram. Engineers like Li would get the India plant up to China speed.