Foxconn backs India’s role in electronics manufacturing

livemint.com:

NEW DELHI : Foxconn Technology Group chairman Young Liu has backed India as an important country for the future of manufacturing, saying that the opportunities for the development of electronics manufacturing and industrial chains were huge. Speaking to reporters at an event in Taipei, Liu said India could build the ecosystem faster than China—which took 30 years—on the back of experience and new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). “Some of India’s developments over the past few years, everyone can see that.

The time has about come for India’s turn to start to fully develop as a country. If there’s no big change, India will be a very important country in terms of manufacturing in the future," the chairman said. “In the past, it took more than 30 years to build an ecosystem in China.

Of course, it will also take an appropriate amount of time in India, but because it has the appropriate experience, the time will be shorter. So it will have many similar situations to those when China was developing, but it will be different from 30 years ago. The environment is not quite the same.

At that time, there was no generative AI or even AI, but now there is AI. Can its (India’s) development be entirely inferred from part of history? I don’t think it’s perfect to speculate from history, but we feel that development of the entire ecosystem and industrial chain, and the opportunities for development in India are very huge opportunities," Liu said. His comments come at a time when India is attempting to position itself as an alternative manufacturing destination to China and a supplier in global value chains amid geopolitical tensions that were leading to global companies shifting some of their manufacturing capacities