In order to build an iPhone in India, Foxconn hired a group of Chinese "masters"
The people behind the on-time production of the "Indian iPhone" are the engineers sent by Foxconn from China to India, but as the transferred party of the industrial chain, why would this group of engineers help India?
With their help, what is the current state of Made in India?
Today we're going to talk about how Chinese engineers helped India build the iPhone.
On September 12, 2023, a mysterious ceremony was underway at the Foxconn factory in Tamil Nadu.
Next to a truck, workers light incense and arrange melons and fruits. Eventually, in the presence of the crowd, a worker smashed a coconut and pumpkin in front of the idol of the deity, a ritual in Hindu tradition to bless the gods.
After the ceremony, the driver stepped on the accelerator, and the wreath-decorated truck quickly disappeared on the other side of the road. Soon, the full load of goods will be distributed further along with logistics, from tricycles, motorcycles, to manpower, to mobile phone stores across India.
The truck was not loaded with jade bracelets waiting to be opened, but iPhones made in a local factory.
For India, this day is undoubtedly worth remembering.
After all, since the layout of the "fruit chain" in 2013, India has been waiting for ten years in order to obtain the right to produce iPhones simultaneously with China.
At the same time, in the staff dormitory of the Foxconn factory in Tamil Nadu, a group of Chinese also gathered around the table to celebrate their victory. Their identities are engineers sent by China's Foxconn to India, and they are also the people behind the launch of the "Indian iPhone" on time.
As the transferred party of the industrial chain, why are they here, and with their help, what is the current situation of Made in India?
Today we're going to talk about how Chinese engineers helped India build the iPhone.
Why India can't make its own apples
In the past 2023, the capital that once rushed into India is undergoing a collective "turnaround".
In May, Wistron, which opened its first Apple foundry in India, sold its business and equipment to the local Tata Group, and withdrew from India.
Then there is Foxconn, which had a high-profile plan to invest $20 billion to "turn a great semiconductor idea" into reality in India, announcing that it has withdrawn from the joint venture with the local Vedanta Group.
BYD, which originally planned to expand its investment in India, failed to negotiate with the Indian government and canceled its plan to build a factory in India.
From a macro point of view, there are many reasons why India has not done a good job in manufacturing, such as infrastructure, administrative efficiency, and even environmental protection and labor policies.
But if we move away from these grand narratives and focus on the production line, we can draw a simpler and more straightforward conclusion: the yield rate of factories in India is not up to the needs of the manufacturing industry, especially a company with an infallible reputation like Apple.
In human terms, relying on the diamond diamond in India alone is indeed not enough to do the porcelain work of apples.
Therefore, the first lesson that Chinese engineers brought to India was to answer the simplest question - how to assemble a qualified Apple phone.
Perhaps in the eyes of some poor friends, assembling a mobile phone does not have any special technical content.
In fact, to some extent, this is an illusion that arises after "seeing the world".
In fact, the ability to quickly turn a small town youth with a blank sheet of paper into an assembly line brother after a short training period is not a factory setting, but the result of China's industrial baptism for many years.
A friend of the bad reviewer once worked as a team leader at Foxconn to manage an assembly line team and experienced the front line of iPhone production.
The team was tasked with a simple task – wiping the antenna with an eraser to remove any residual impurities from it and prevent it from affecting signal transmission.
But even this simple job actually has a lot of details.
For example, the force should not be too large, otherwise it may cause damage to the antenna, and for example, after wiping, you also need to clean the antenna to ensure that there is no eraser residue, otherwise it will cause a short circuit.
What is the appropriate strength, how to wipe it faster, and the pass rate is higher, all of which are similar to the lesson plans of the half-blood prince in "Harry Potter", which are the "cheats" of skilled workers and mature managers. A worker who has just "gone online" often has to have the "help and guidance" of the old man on the assembly line in order to catch up with the progress.
In order to manufacture a qualified iPhone on a large scale, it is necessary to involve countless such parts and processes, including personnel allocation, division of labor, how many people are required for quality inspection, how to determine the qualification standard, how to carry out quality inspection, how to rework non-conforming products, how to destroy waste materials, and even how fast the assembly line is opened, how to make up for the production capacity of workers on leave, etc., etc., must be considered as a whole.
In such a high-entropy system, the difficulty is much greater than 1+1 than 2. If you add up thousands of 1s, the result is almost astronomical.
The vast majority of the employees at the iPhone assembly plant in Tamil Nadu are women from the surrounding rural areas who have just "run" to the city, and most of their last jobs were in the tertiary industry or simply full-time housewives. Not to mention the production of iPhones, even the factories are a strange term to them.
The factory did not have enough production experience to speed up, which meant that they had to start from scratch to train them into qualified assembly line workers.
India's poor education has further raised the bar for these potential workers to become qualified assembly line workers.
《 the rest of world 》采访到的一位印度富士康女工 Padmini 就是个典型例子。
The 26-year-old "factory girl", who has a degree in nursing and worked as a family nurse before joining Foxconn to work as a screw, chose to join Foxconn because she couldn't stand the 24-hour work that was on hand.
But after entering the factory, she found that she didn't even know how to use tweezers, and she had never even heard of the name tweezers before.
emmmmm, studying nursing, being a family nurse, but not knowing tweezers, is somewhat outrageous.
In fact, compared to the academic qualifications of many other workers, Padmini's academic qualifications are already far ahead.
Under this kind of hellish start, it is really difficult to get this group of new workers to assemble mobile phones.
Therefore, in order to go from zero to one as soon as possible, Foxconn arranged a group of Indian employees to come to the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen to "study abroad" and visit the advanced experience of Chinese counterparts in screwing. In addition, Chinese engineers were arranged in the Indian factory to conduct large-scale training for employees.
Early last year, Foxconn sent hundreds of Chinese engineers to India to translate and explain Foxconn's standard assembly processes and processes for Indian workers. When the ramp-up took place in April, more Chinese engineers were sent to India to help optimize the production line.
For Chinese engineers, this is not an easy job.
Not only did Chiglish communicate with curry English, but from time to time he had to get his hands on it. The poor foundation of the Indian staff has also allowed the patience of Chinese engineers to wander on the brink of outburst.
In foreign media reports, there was a record of such an incident: an engineer from China silently repaired the equipment himself after several times he could not teach Indian technicians how to deal with failures. After the Indian employee muttered that the Chinese engineer had not taught him how to deal with the fault, he was greeted by a roar from the Chinese engineer: "How many more times am I going to teach you?"
Some of you may have to ask, since the language and culture, work rhythm, living habits of Chinese engineers and the communication of local workers are so difficult, why do you entrust such an important task to this group of "foreign monks"?
Why Chinese engineers
In fact, the reason why Foxconn and Apple are looking for Chinese engineers to do this is not only because of their professional counterparts, but also because no one else can do it except them.
At the beginning of the iPhone era, many of Foxconn's martial arts were practiced with Apple's engineers.
For example, the classic joke that used to circulate in the industry.
In the warehouse of one of Apple's southern foundries, rats often eat double-sided tape. After Apple's headquarters found out, it sent people from the United States to formulate a set of warehouse cat raising plans, and even set cat food KPIs for cats.
Although this story is more of a joke, Apple at that time did send engineers to the foundry to solve the detailed process problems before the new product was put into production.
It can be said that both the concept of "fruit chain" and the Apple factory in China, which is comparable to a small city, were born together with the iPhone.
In 2007, when the iPhone was born, the manufacture and assembly of smartphones was not only new to Foxconn and China, but also an unprecedented attempt for Apple.
It's not so much that Apple makes the iPhone in China, it's that the Chinese industry chain and Apple co-created the iPhone.
But for Apple, this set of successful experiences in China is actually difficult to copy and paste in India.
On the one hand, what Apple is doing in India is no longer creating, but transferring.
Starting from nothing can be done at any cost, but from one to ten you must be careful with your budget.
In those days, just one touch screen took Apple two years and supply chain companies to polish it over and over again. Now that Apple's supply system has long been mature, whether it is calculated in terms of time cost or economic benefits, it is impossible to repeat the "suffering march" in China a few years ago in order to build a factory in India.
On the other hand, 15 years have passed since the first iPhone rolled off the assembly line at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou.
Fifteen years is enough for NASA to forget how to land on the moon, and it is enough to turn any production line into an intricate "mountain of". Steve Jobs may know more about iPhones than anyone else, but Apple doesn't know how to build phones better than China's first-line Foxconn engineers.
And Apple's identity has long been upgraded from a blue-collar worker who personally helped the foundry solve process problems to a hand-throwing party A who remotely commands in California, although the foundry is almost one-way transparent to Apple, but in addition to what parameters should be placed in the brief, Apple does not actually grasp the specific technical problems of the manufacturing process.
This outsourcing of low-value-added manufacturing has helped Apple make a lot of money over the past fifteen years, but it has also led to the consequence that everything related to iPhone production, equipment, personnel, and almost all the documentation needed is basically in China.
And since India wants to make the same quality iPhone as China, of course, it must use the same equipment and technology as China.
As a result, in the Indian factory, the machine is in Chinese, the operating procedure is in Chinese, the work instructions, the programming interface, and even the big words "panic button" are all in Chinese.
It can be said that the entire Indian factory, except for the people who are curry-flavored, is a copy and paste of the Chinese factory.
If you start from scratch to gnaw on these documentation, the difficulty is tantamount to Apple going through the road of tossing and turning in China for two years just for a piece of screen glass. Whether in terms of efficiency or profit, it is a loss-making transaction.
So even if they communicate in sign language, the Chinese engineers who use these devices to make mobile phones at Foxconn every day are already the most efficient equipment manuals that Indian counterparts can find.
In fact, the results of the Chinese engineers in the factory were immediate, and in just one year, the assembly yield of the iPhone factory in India increased from "less than 50%" rumored last year to a level that Apple could accept, and successfully completed the goal of co-producing the iPhone 15 at the same time as the Chinese factory.
Even the aforementioned tweezers, the Padmini, is now up to date and can assemble 500 volume keys in an hour.
The Indian iPhone 15 quickly gained unprecedented popularity in the home market, where it was produced locally, eliminating high import taxes and making it nearly a fifth cheaper than the imported version.
Amid the hurricane-like national sentiment, many TikTok and YouTube influencers have also taken the stage and uploaded videos of themselves buying cheap iPhones in India in solidarity with the hard-won "Made in India" victory. And has received praise from countless fans.
It seems that in 2023, when Made in India once fell into collapse, there is a rather glamorous turning point in such a carnival.
But, is this kind of Made in India really what the Indians, or rather, the Indian workers, want?
Controversy over involution
In fact, the arrival of Chinese engineers on the B-side, where manufacturing is thriving in India, has also brought some not-so-positive "specialties" to Indian workers.
Although the addition of Chinese engineers has pressed the accelerator button to clear the technical barriers for Indian factories, the Chinese "masters" are obviously not satisfied with the efficiency of Indian "students".
In order to speed up India's workers, Chinese engineers are knowingly or unconsciously bringing the not-so-beautiful culture of "involution" to India.
Last June, the upcoming iPhone 15 was pre-produced at the factory.
Although Foxconn's attempts to introduce a "two-shift" 12-hour workday eventually came to naught amid continuous protests, Indian workers, who used to enjoy coffee breaks and a relatively relaxed working environment, had to be "spurred" by Chinese engineers. It even made many Indian migrant workers experience the first late-night overtime in their lives in the past three months.
The constant stress has even caused problems for some workers, with ambulances going back and forth between the local hospital and Foxconn more than once.
In the wake of a rocket-launched marathon, many Indian workers have chosen to pay themselves for a reward. But more people choose to spend a portion of the prize money to buy a cheap Xiaomi, but few people follow the trend of buying an iPhone with cheap bold and enlarged headlines and covers, even if it may be assembled by their own hands.
Those who are all over the world are as difficult as silkworm raisers in India.
What does Chinese engineers, and even Made in India itself, mean to Indians? The merits of this cannot be accurately evaluated by the bad reviewers.
But in the opinion of the bad reviewer, no matter which perspective we take, this is a successful exchange between a mature but imperfect industrial system and another emerging power.
Whatever the outcome, it's a new life, at least for the increasingly skilled women workers at Foxconn factories in India.
There is efficiency, passion, money, involution, dross, and countless poisonous wine and chicken soup.
The most important thing is that this is a new world, whether this is the "teacher" or the "student" in the story.
Whether this model, this kind of life, is good or bad, I think it should be told by those who have experienced it.
Just like when the bad reviewer asked the friend who used to work at Foxconn, but eventually returned to his hometown, if he regretted giving all his youth to the assembly line, his answer: "Life without stress may be expensive, but if there are no more options, how do you know the answer?"