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Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

I’d be curious to know which parts of the manufacturing process are carried out in India. I assume it includes “final assembly”. But does all CNC work, PCB assembly happen in India?

PCB assembly in particular, seems unlikely? The supply chains are all in China, and it’s a largely automated procsss.

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It's been hard for me to find a definitive number [1], and what that actually means, but it looks like to labeled something as "made in India" companies are required to have 30% of the final product locally sourced.

[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn... I linked this article because the bit at the bottom:

> According to the foreign direct investment rules [...] “sourcing of 30 per cent of the value of goods purchased will be done from India, preferably from MSMEs, village and cottage industries, artisans and craftsmen, in all sectors”

I feel like getting to 30% of the value would be a stretch if the ICs, PCB assembly, and possibly screen are coming from China and Taiwan/TSMC. Like, the case and battery are worth something, but not tons.

It's pretty easy to value custom built components whatever you like.

They are either very cheap components, but you paid a massive r&d grant to have them designed for you, or they are very expensive components but you paid no r&d costs.

Choose whatever suits to best avoid taxes, quotas, fees, and regulations...

> It's pretty easy to value custom built components whatever you like.

Not if you’ve valued them very differently before in different tax jurisdictions. There’s definitely a certain degree of freedom in how the components of a finished product are valued when they have no, or very limited, alternative uses, but you can’t just pick a number arbitrarily out of a hat. Companies have to do internal cost accounting to figure out whether manufacturing a component to a certain quality, or in a certain place makes sense, and while there may not be exact equivalents on the open market there will be close ones in most cases. Worst comes to worst you can see how much an order of size X would cost from a manufacturer capable of producing the component. There are many degrees of freedom in transfer pricing but they’re finite.

I guess that's true. If you're not actually selling them other than in your device, you can argue that they're basically worthless as bits of plastic and metal, and all the "value" is being created by the India-based assembly process that turns them from parts into functioning phones.

Not if you're paying X to produce these parts.

You can't say "this part is only worth $10" if it's costing you $100 to produce.

Does it actually cost $100 to produce an IC, though? Like, the manufacture of the device itself is relatively cheap, especially in volume— all the cost is R&D, test harnesses, simulation, license fees, etc.

For extra points make different choices in different tax jurisdictions.

The magic of GAAP

That is not entirely true, you cant just name an R&D budget, you have to show it in some way.

It is super true if you are using outside resources for R&D/NREC.

Line item on the PO or wrap it into the part costs.

Is this specifically US? Surely you cant warp, say PCB that normally cost 20 cents on the upper bound and average of 10 cents, and say it now cost $20, because you are amortise $2 Billion of R&D over the 100M unit?

You could definitely hide a lot of R&D within some form of limit, but it isn't a free pass for everything. At least from what I knew in the old UK's standard. There is a new what's labeled as UK's GAAP which I have no idea about.

This particular requirement is tied to operating what's called a single-brand retail outlet in India. That would be Apple-owned Apple Stores. It is not clear to me if this is a requirement for foreign manufacturers who are manufacturing/assembling products in India and then exporting them.

The phones are labeled "Assembled in India", not "Made in India", and have less than 30% locally sourced materials. There is some discussion to possibly meet this level eventually, but it is not currently the case.

This is why it took this much time for Apple to set it up.

Apple asked for and got exemptions to the 30% rule.

Apple already uses multiple suppliers for each stage of production, so shipping production lines to other countries wouldn't be that difficult. Beyond that you'd just be sourcing bulk components, which I'm sure their Chinese suppliers will happily ship to India. Raw materials like the aluminum could be locally sourced.

> which I'm sure their Chinese suppliers will happily ship to India

That's a good point. The requirements seems to be about locally sourcing components, not locally manufacturing them. It's entirely possible for a Chinese company to have a subsidiary in India that's supplying components to Apple.

>It's entirely possible for a Chinese company to have a subsidiary in India that's supplying components to Apple

IIRC : isn't it Foxconn making the phones in India too ?

Yes but that is assuming the component being imported to India are without traffic.

Note that largely automated processes are quite easygoing to move between regions, since labor cost is not a significant factor.

I think it's still done by Foxconn, just at an Indian facility. Chinese company in India, not domestic capability.

Foxconn is a Taiwan based company.

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