Tata's $125 million acquisition of WeIndia iPhone foundry

Wistron announced Oct. 27 that its board of directors has approved the sale of Wistron InfoComm Manufacturing (India) Private Ltd. to the Tata Group for a tentative transaction price of $125 million.

In recent years, due to the thin profitability of the iPhone assembly business, Wistron has decided to gradually downsize its iPhone assembly business and production capacity, and shift to explore areas other than iPhone foundry, such as the server market. In July 2020, Wistron announced the sale of its Kunshan plant, which produces iPhones, to Lucent Precision, and completed the delivery in January 2021, with Lucent acquiring Wistron Investment (Jiangsu) and Wistron Ares (Kunshan) for RMB 3.3 billion.

It is worth noting that in December 2020, Wistron's iPhone foundry in India had suffered an employee riot due to labor disputes, with more than 2,000 workers smashing the plant's production line equipment as well as vehicles, and thousands of new iPhone handsets were stolen, with a loss of up to 7.12 million U.S. dollars, which seriously affected the confidence of Wistron's operations in India. This also seems to be a key reason that prompted Wistron's decision to sell its Indian iPhone foundry.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India's Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, later congratulated Tata on taking over Wistron's business, and Tata will now begin manufacturing iPhones in India for the domestic and global markets.

Wistron, which entered India in 2008 to provide repair services for PCs, laptops, servers and other devices it produces, began assembling iPhones for Apple in India in 2017, and was the first of Apple's three global OEMs to begin producing iPhones in India, but it was unable to penetrate Apple's supply chain as deeply as Foxconn and PEGATRON did -- for supplier inventory management -- and after it sold its Kunshan, China, subsidiary to Lixin in 2020 and stopped assembling iPhones in China, the Indian business also became too small to focus on.

"Wistron failed to make any money from the Apple business in India,"one executive said. "It has tried to negotiate with Apple for higher margins, but it is small compared to Foxconn and PEGATRON globally and therefore does not have the corresponding clout."

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