Samsung Electronics Co. opened the world’s largest mobile phone factory in India, in a win for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship program to lure investors to manufacture in the South Asian nation.
The factory was inaugurated by Modi and South Korean President Moon Jae-in during their visit to the facility in located at the outskirts of Delhi. This will double Samsung’s Noida unit capacity for mobile phones to 120 million units a year from 68 million units a year, it said in a statement. The phase-wise expansion will be completed by 2020.
Smartphone makers from Xiaomi Corp. to Oppo Mobiles are building factories in the world’s fastest growing market for the product bolstering Modi’s push to encourage overseas investors to “Make in India.” Asia’s third-largest economy attracted record foreign direct investment in the past year totaling $62 billion, including reinvestment.
Indians favor low-end smartphones priced at $250 or less, given the low average annual income of its people, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s one reason why Apple Inc. has struggled to gain market share in India, with most iPhone models priced beyond $500, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report earlier this month.
Last year, India overtook the US to become the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China. There will be 780 million connected smartphones in 2021, compared with 359 million in 2016, according to a study by Cisco Systems.