Cheng Uei Precision Industry Co., a Taiwan-based cable and connector maker, will start mass production for Apple Inc. later this year from its new plant in India, according to a person familiar with the matter, the latest sign of the US company’s increasing presence in the South Asian country.
Apple’s major assembly partners, Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, Pegatron Corp. and Wistron Corp., have all set up either a subsidiary or an iPhone assembly plant in India. The chairman of Cheng Uei, also known as Foxlink, is TC Gou, the brother of Foxconn founder Terry Gou.
India is trying to attract manufacturing for Apple, Samsung Electronics Co. and other major smartphone brands with an incentive program, as political tensions between the US and China escalate. The global coronavirus pandemic has added pressure on companies to review supply chains.
Cheng Uei said in a statement on Friday that a company engineer was caught on internal surveillance video this month damaging automation equipment at the new Indian plant near Chennai. The suspect is a Chinese national, and the incident was reported to local police and Chinese authorities, it said.