As reported earlier, Gionee will be joining a couple of other smartphone players in the Make in India league as it is going to make an announce about the same along with its partner Foxconn at an event in Vizag today. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu will be the chief guest at the event.
William Lu, President, Gionee said to The Mobile Indian, “In the initial phase we will be only assembling smartphones in India at the Foxconn facility in Sri City and over a period of time we will start doing an end to end production in India.”
When inquired about why Gionee is foraying into Make in India program along with Foxconn, when it manufactures devices on its own in China William said, “This is the just the starting and we want to gauge the market before we go into full-fledged manufacturing and at that time we may explore setting up our own facility. As of now we have an able partner in Foxconn.”
He further added, “The first devices to come out of Foxconn facility will be feature phones under F and M series.”
Foxconn is also manufacturing phones for Xiaomi from its Visakhapatnam plant. Prior to that InFocus also partnered with Foxconn to make phones in India.
Even another, China based company Lenovo has started manufacturing smartphones from its Sriperumbudur plant in Chennai. The plant will make Motorola as well as Lenovo smartphones. Infact, it has already started delivering Motorola Moto E from the plant (note: Lenovo owns the Motorola brand) and will soon start manufacturing the Lenovo K3 Note in the plant.
The plant has separate manufacturing lines for both Motorola and Lenovo. By December this year, six million units will be manufactured in the plant including both Motorola and Lenovo devices. Lenovo plans to manufacture/ source 30 per cent components locally for the devices manufactured in Chennai plant by 2016.