By Munsif Vengattil and Praveen Paramasivam
CHENNAI (Reuters) -Taiwan’s Foxconn has signed an agreement with India’s Tamil Nadu to invest 16 billion rupees ($194 million) in a new electronic components manufacturing facility that will create 6,000 jobs, the government of the southern state said on Monday.
The facility will be for Foxconn Industrial Internet (FII), a Foxconn unit, with the proposed campus coming up at the Kancheepuram district near the state capital of Chennai, a state government source said on condition of anonymity as the details are not yet public.
The facility will be separate from the current sprawling campus near Chennai where Foxconn assembles Apple’s iPhones and employs more than 35,000 people, the source said.
“This is a major achievement for the state,” Tamil Nadu Minister for Industries TRB Rajaa said in a statement, after Foxconn Chairman Young Liu and other representatives met with the state officials including its chief minister.
Foxconn did not respond to a request for comment.
Liu has been in India to attend the federal government’s semiconductor conference that ended on Sunday.
Reuters reported last week that the Foxconn subsidiary was in talks with Tamil Nadu about the investment, with the company aiming for the plant’s completion in 2024.
Foxconn’s FII makes electronic devices, cloud service equipment and industrial robots. It was not immediately clear if the new India plant would make components for iPhones or for other companies, or both.
Foxconn plans to quadruple the workforce at its iPhone factory in Tamil Nadu by late 2024 in a bid to spread its bets beyond China, Reuters reported last year.
($1 = 82.2825 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru and Praveen Paramasivam in Chennai; Additional reporting by Yi-Mou Lee; Editing by Aditya Kalra, Jamie Freed and Himani Sarkar)
