Apple will reportedly announce the location of its first store in India this month

tech2 News StaffMay 08, 2019 16:46:52 IST

Apple’s struggle to open its official store in India went on for so long that the location of the company’s first store in the country is now making the news.

Per a report by Bloomberg, Apple has short-listed the locations for its first retail store in India, and it is going to be in Mumbai. Needless to mention, the chosen location are ‘upscale sites’ in the city, and will reportedly be at par with Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York.

Over the next few weeks, Apple will apparently be revealing the final location for its first store. However, the report also mentions that this store will not be ready before the year 2020.

A customer seeing the new iPhones at an Apple Store. Image: Reuters

Apple has been working on opening its own stores in India for a few years now, however, it could not get approvals because it doesn’t meet local sourcing requirements. Apple applied for the same in 2016, but the proposal was never cleared as the government mandates that companies opting for over 51 percent foreign investment must get nearly a third of their products manufactured locally.

Apple recently turned things around when it announced in April this year that it will start mass production of iPhones in India with the help of Foxconn. Earlier, a large amount of iPhone production took place in China, but Apple now seems to be making a big shift towards the Indian market. And since this also fulfills the local sourcing requirement, we will soon have five new official Apple Stores in India.

Apple already has Wistron producing older iPhone models in Bengaluru, and the manufacturer recently started making the iPhone 7 locally. With Foxconn, Apple plans to expand manufacturing to produce newer iPhone models.

“India is a very important market in the long term,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said after the company’s earnings report for last quarter. “It’s a challenging market in the short term, but we’re learning a lot. We plan on going in there with sort of all of our might.”

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