Apple may be one step closer to bringing Apple Pay and a permanent manufacturing base in India, following a meeting between India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Tim Cook.
“Cook responded positively,” India’s Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Vikas Swarup said after the meeting. “I think India does fits into his long term plans.”
During the meeting, Tim Cook stressed the fact that India has a “very special place in the heart of every Apple employee” because it was the country Steve Jobs visited as a young man searching for inspiration. That inspiration was indirectly what led to Apple.
There are no details about Apple Pay’s planned arrival date in India, other than the fact that Cook was willing to discuss it. Cook also talked about the app development economy, which he noted, “could be a very very important factor for entrepreneurship where individual app developers can just become part of the app universe.”
Narendra Modi arrived in New York on September 24, and headed to the West Coast over the weekend. In addition to meeting Cook, Modi also spent time with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Tesla Motor’s Elon Musk.
This isn’t the first time Indian officials have pushed Apple to invest in the country. This April, Apple’s regulatory head for Europe, Middle East, India and Africa met with India’s Communications and I.T. Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to listen to a proposal for Apple to open an R&D center in the country. This would benefit India by adding legitimacy to its booming tech industry, like Apple’s R&D facility in Israel did for that country.
On top of this, there has also been discussing about Foxconn shifting iPhone production to India, since this would allow Foxconn to get around the problem of accelerating wage inflation in China, where the majority of iPhones are made at the moment.
Source: Times of India
