Apple’s Vice-President of Product Operations, Priya Balasubramaniam, said that Apple supports around one million jobs in India, including the company’s own employees, people engaged in the growing iOS app economy and supply partners. She was speaking at the ongoing Bengaluru Tech Summit.

She added that the tech company is investing significantly in Indian market to expand Apple’s reach and engage with more local suppliers. Apple started manufacturing iPhones in 2017 at a facility in Bengaluru, and since then it has expanded facilities in Bengaluru and Chennai, manufacturing several iPhone models for the domestic market and for export.

“Apple had established its online store in India, offering a full range of the company’s products and services directly to Indian customers. We are looking forward to expanding further with physical retail stores, too,” said Balasubramaniam.

New technologies

Further, talking about the rapid transformation in the manufacturing industry, Balasubramaniam said that manufacturing is being transformed by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality 3-D printing.

“What they add up to is the new form of manufacturing. Some call it Industry 4.0, we call it smart manufacturing.”

Sharing more context on how Apple looks at smart manufacturing, she noted that instead of using expensive optical inspection machines to measure part dimensions for quality assurance, one could use an iPhone’s 14 bionic chipset and camera to run machine vision algorithms.

“In milliseconds, we can capture product deviations. In the past workers needed to be on the factory floor to measure performance metrics. Now, with connectivity and data analytics, we can track these metrics in real-time from anywhere in the world. We can now develop predictive models that anticipate issues, and we can proactively implement corrective actions, without slowing productivity,” she added.

One of the projects that Apple is piloting in India as part of its smart manufacturing vision is called station monitoring with video ML. This project allows remote monitoring and control of production, which increases productivity.