Apple's Make in India demands in January 2017

Apple is the world's largest information technology company by revenue, the world's largest technology company by total assets, and the manufacturer. In November 2014, in addition to being the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization, Apple became the first U.S. company to be valued at over US$700 billion. The company employs 115,000 permanent full-time employees as of July 2015 and maintains 478 retail stores in seventeen countries as of March 2016.It operates the online Apple Store and iTunes Store, the latter of which is the world's largest music retailer. There are over one billion actively used Apple products worldwide as of March 2016.

      In a short space of time, the obsolete and obstructive frameworks of the past have been dismantled and replaced with a transparent and user-friendly system that is helping drive investment, foster innovation, develop skills, protect Internet Protocol (IP) and build best-in-class manufacturing infrastructure. The most striking indicator of progress is the unprecedented opening up of key sectors – including Railways, Defense, Insurance and Medical Devices – to dramatically higher levels of Foreign Direct Investment.

Apple is trying to negotiate with the Indian government over the terms and conditions under which it will contribute to the Make in India campaign by doing some manufacturing or assembly within the country. There are two different sets of requests here, one set which should be granted--not just for Apple but for everyone--and another set which should be rejected. Those that should be granted are the relaxations of the rules on who may do what, where, when and how. Those that should be rejected are any form of partiality or exemptions in taxation or other financial arrangements. That is, for Apple as well as for everyone else, we should have the freest marketplace possible along with just the one set of fiscal demands upon all.

Apple takes pride in the design language of its products and any distraction is a plain distraction; even if that means government mandated printing of product information. As the Cupertino, California-based company aims to set up its manufacturing unit in India, it has raised a number of requests to the government seeking various concessions. One of the recent requests made by the company seeks relaxation of the labeling laws so that the aesthetic value of Apple products is not depleted when it reaches consumers.Someone, somewhere, might take that to be an important point. But it's doubtful that anyone is doing so seriously. Take that to be a negotiating point rather than anything else: Currently, Apple's products are manufactured in six countries, including Korea, Japan and the US.Earlier, the finance ministry in May had rejected relaxing the 30 per cent domestic sourcing norms, as sought by the iPhone and iPad maker as a pre-condition for bringing in FDI to set up single-brand retail stores in the country. The company had sought exemption on the ground that it makes state-of-the-art and cutting-edge technology products for which local sourcing is not possible.The government had also turned down the firm's proposal to import refurbished phones and sell them in India.