“The Sunguvarchatram plant still assembled fewer than 10% of all iPhone 15s, according to people familiar with the matter.”
About 35,000 people work at Foxconn’s Tamil Nadu campus, and base pay only rose to 18,000 rupees a month, about $216, after a 2021 food-poisoning protest. The plant needed hundreds of Chinese engineers to copy the Foxconn formula and still ran higher defect rates for a while. India lacks China’s suppliers who cut their own margins to win Apple orders. Every iPhone built there has been less profitable than one built in China.