Xiaomi said on Thursday it has roped in three new manufacturing partners for augmenting its smartphone and television capacities in India.
The China-headquartered firm has tied up with BYD and DBG for setting up smartphone manufacturing plants in India and Radiant Technology for manufacturing smart TVs.
Xiaomi currently manufactures smartphones in India through its partners Foxconn and Flex, which have factories in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, and TVs in partnership with Dixon Technologies in Andhra Pradesh.
The company said while DBG has set up a smartphone manufacturing plant in Haryana, BYD is setting up a plant in Tamil Nadu. Radiant Technology has set up a manufacturing plant in Telangana.
“Today, we are renewing our commitment by adding new manufacturing partners. Now 99% of our smartphones and 100% of our smart TVs are manufactured in India and the majority of the components for smartphones will be locally manufactured or sourced from India. We hope to play a small role in building India as a global manufacturing hub,” the company’s MD Manu Kumar Jain said.
He added that with significant increase in demand for smartphones on account of work and study from home and high content consumption, there was a need to expand capacity to cater to the domestic demand.
Noting that the pandemic led to multiple challenges disrupting the entire global and India supply chain, Mr. Jain added that the company’s partnership with DBG will increase the brand’s monthly manufacturing capacity by about 20%. “BYD India is also expected to contribute significantly to the production capacity once its operations begin by H1 of 2021,” he said.
The company added that it has been ramping up local manufacturing and sourcing of smartphone components and currently majority of the components such as PCBA (mother board), sub board, camera module, battery, back panel, USB cable, chargers, boxes and many more components are locally sourced or locally manufactured in India. “All these components contribute to more than 75% of the value of smartphones,” it said, adding that these components are being manufactured by partners such as Sunny India, NVT, Salcomp, LY Tech and Sunvoda, among others.
“In the year 2020, Mi India and its partners generated employment for 10,000 new individuals taking the entire workforce count to 60,000,” Mr. Jain said.
