Huawei combines with Flextronics to make phones in India from October

Chinese telecom giant Huawei has partnered with electronics contract manufacturer Flextronics for making Honor smartphones in India starting with three million units from next month, besides creating 10,500 jobs.       

"The investment in electronics manufacturing, which was around Rs 11,000 crore, has risen to Rs 1.24 lakh crore. It isa great sense of satisfaction, as indicated to me, this(Huawei) will be 40th manufacturing unit in the country," IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said while innaugurating the Huawei-Flex Chennai manufacturing facility from here.       

Huawei will start making its Honor series phones at the manufacturing plant of Flextronics from October 1. "Today we announce the start of manufacturing of our Honorphones in India with Flextronics. This underlines our long term committment for India. Spectrum auction is coming and we will like to commit to Indian industry that we will make available all out latest technology product including 4G, 4Gplus and 5G products," Huawei India Chief Executive Officer Jay Chen said.       

He said that Huawei is the third-largest smartphone maker after Apple and Samsung. "We have partnered with Flextronics who work with us globally to make our Honor series smartphones in the country. Initially we have tied up for 3 million units and will scale up as per demand. This project will create 3,000 direct employment opportunity at Huawei and 6,000 indirect jobs,"  P Sanjeev, Vice President Sales (India Business Head for Huawei& honor Consumer Business).       

He said that hiring of 3,000 people will be completed by the end of this year, taking Huawei's direct workforce toaround 12,000 in India.        Flextronics will hire an additional 1,500 people to workon the Huawei project.       

"We have capacity to make 10 million phones in India. Wewill scale up production as per requirement of Huawei. Flextronics will hire 1,500 people dedicated for servicing Huawei smartphones," Jeff Reece, President, Networking Solutions, Flextronics said.       

Reece said that Flextronics will provide after-sales services, shipping of phones to retailers and reverse logistics when devices from customers for repairing needs to be picked up.       

"We will set up 45 experience centres for Huawei initially," Reece said. Sanjeev said that Huawei has tied up with 350 distributorsto sell smartphones from over 50,000 retail counters in the country covering all the districts.       

"We have been aggressively competing in India. Now I can say we are ready in all aspects for giving massive push to our business in India. We believe India will overtake US as the second largest smartphone market in 2017. If we have to grow our rank globally, we need to focus on India," Sanjeev said. Huawei will sell both Huawei and Honor phones through offline channel partners.