Apple has started hiring employees for its retail stores in India and announced plans to fill more roles as it prepares to open its first flagship location in the world’s second-largest smartphone market as soon as this quarter.
On Friday, Apple’s careers page listed openings for 12 different job functions it wanted to fill “various locations in India,” including technical specialists, business experts, senior managers, store leaders and “geniuses.”
Many job descriptions directly refer to flagship retail operations. “Apple Stores are a retail environment like no other – focused exclusively on delivering an amazing customer experience,” said one.
The 12 listings show hundreds of job openings, as Apple Stores typically have at least 100 employees and flagship locations can have up to 1,000 employees.
Some functions on Apple’s website, such as “market leadership,” describe managing teams “in Apple Stores,” which means several locations are in the works beyond the 22,000-square-foot location reported to open in Mumbai in early March.
Separately, at least five employees in Mumbai and New Delhi have announced on LinkedIn that they have been hired for yet-to-be-announced stores. One announced he had been named “Lead Genius” – a customer-facing tech support role – while another said he had been named a senior manager. Apple’s head of recruitment in India, Renu Sevanthi, “celebrated” some of the announcements on the social networking site.
Apple, which was not immediately available for comment, has yet to confirm plans to open its first store in the country. But in February 2020 CEO Tim Cook told investors Apple Store would expand to India next year, saying he was not content to leave retail sales to franchise partners. “I don’t want someone else to run the brand for us,” Cook said at the 2020 annual shareholder meeting.
Later that year Apple launched an online store for India, greeting online shoppers with “Namaste”, but a physical store has failed to emerge.
The expansion will be important for Apple as it tries to diversify its manufacturing from China and gives momentum to its new manufacturing operation in India. Supply chain experts say Apple has “silicon to store” ambitions to control every aspect of the customer experience – from Apple-designed chips in phones to Apple store clerks.
“The stars are finally aligning for Apple in India,” said Neil Shah, an analyst at Counterpoint, a market intelligence group.
Cook personally visited and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015, reportedly lobbying to open an Apple Store in the country. But protectionist rules require foreign companies that sell goods directly to consumers to source 30 percent of their components locally.
However, the rules have been relaxed in recent years, and in 2017 Apple suppliers began assembling iPhones in India. This allows to avoid the 22 percent tariff, which helps to increase sales. New Delhi has started offering incentives to smartphone makers to move more production to the country, prompting major investments from Taiwanese contract manufacturers Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron.
India’s Tata Group, which makes casings for iPhones in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, plans to expand operations to supply more components to Apple, according to three people familiar with the plans, which the Indian industry group has yet to commit to. comments.
Last year, an estimated 200 million smartphones were manufactured in India, ten times the number installed in 2014, according to Counterpoint. And while Apple’s market share in India is only 5 percent, it is growing rapidly and leads the premium segment with two-fifths of all sales.
“Since the pandemic, the number of iPhones sold in India has almost doubled,” Shah said. “That drives sales of Macs, Apple Watches and iPads. There is a positive network effect. So Apple is aware of this fast-growing market, and now is the right time to enter, to invest.
Shah said that by the end of this year, Apple India is expected to have a four-layer sales strategy.
This will include e-commerce sales, at least two flagship stores in the most affluent cities, 10 or more other stores with potential partnerships with Tata, in tier one and tier two cities, as well as developing “store-within-a-store” partnerships with big box retailers in throughout the country.
Additional reporting by John Reed in New Delhi