 "Andhra Pradesh aims to create 60 mn handset production base")
"We aim to have a production base of 5 million handsets a month within a year's time compared to 1 lakh handsets a month being currently rolled out from Foxxcon's facility in Sri City," Kartikeya Misra, director of industries, told Business Standard.
AP tasted the initial success in its endeavor to attract mobile manufacturing companies with the Foxconn's first assembly line beginning to produce phones for Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. On Monday Xiaomi launched its first India made Redmi 2 Prime model in Visakhapatnam.
According to Misra, the government had facilitated Xiaomi to roll out its products from Foxconn facility in the quickest possible time of 100 days and the government would continue the same level of facilitation for other mobile phone manufacturers to launch their operations in the state.
He said Foxconn's manufacturing facility itself is expected to grow to a size of 8,000 employees from the present 1000 workers by February next year, keeping in line with the global mobile manufacturers' response to Make in India call.
In India 257 million mobile units were sold in the calendar year 2014, according to a Cyber Media Research report released in February this year while a large per centage of these units were imported. The state government wants to command a manufacturing share of 60 million mobile handsets annually in the next one year as it expects a big shift in favour of domestic manufacturing.