Apple Hiring For Retail Stores In India, Eyes Launch Within Weeks

Smartphone manufacturer Apple has sped up its plans to open retail stores in India and is now reportedly looking to unveil the flagship Apple Stores within weeks.

The Indian Express reported that as many as two new stores – one each in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex  and Delhi’s Saket – can be launched in a span of weeks. 

This comes close on the heels of Apple putting up various vacancies for hiring local talent at its retail stores in India. In total, the company announced 12 job roles, including technical specialist, business expert, senior manager, store leader and ‘genius’.

The job descriptions refer to the company’s retail operations in the country and include terms such as ‘across Apple Stores’, hinting that the company is looking to establish multiple such retail stores in India. 

The development was also implicitly confirmed by Apple India’s head of recruiting Renu Sevanthi who made multiple announcements about candidates selected for the jobs on her LinkedIn profile. 

There was no immediate clarity on the number of employees that the tech major is looking to hire in the country. An average Apple Store globally has at least 100 employees which means that hundreds of jobs can be in the pipeline. 

While Financial Times reported that the first store can be unveiled in the current quarter, the Indian Express said that the Apple Store can be launched within weeks.

Apple Stores are the company’s flagship stores which operate as a showcase platform for Apple products and also provide technical support for customers. Previously it was reported that the tech major was looking at opening a 22,000 square foot location in Mumbai as early as March.

The 2020 Promise

The work on Apple Stores comes nearly eight years after Apple chief executive officer (CEO) Tim Cook visited India in 2015 and lobbied with Indian authorities for opening an Apple Store in India. 

Eventually in 2020, the company announced that it was going to open three company-owned stores across major cities in the country. 

At its annual shareholder meeting in 2020, Cook said he did not want “somebody else to run the brand for us” in India. He was referring to the dominance of ecommerce platforms Flipkart and Amazon and other resellers in the iPhone sales in the country. 

While the company planned to unveil the stores as early as 2021, the plans were derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Subsequently, the Cupertino-based giant opted to launch an online store in the country in late 2020 to strengthen its grip on the Indian market.

The latest development about retail stores comes at a time when India has emerged as a major hub for manufacturing iPhones and Apples has been witnessing a major uptick in its exports from India. 

Apple reportedly shipped more than $2.5 Bn worth of iPhones from India in the April-December 2022 period, nearly 2X more compared to the export value in the entire financial year 2021-22.

The renewed focus on India comes as the company strengthens its position in the country, both in manufacturing and sales. The government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme has also helped the company. 

The lockdown restrictions in China and US’ geopolitical tensions with China have also led to the company looking to shift some of its production outside China.

Meanwhile, Apple aims to have at least two flagship stores in ‘affluent’ Indian cities, with plans to open 10 or more other stores in a potential partnership with Tata in Tier-I and Tier-II cities, according to Indian Express. 

Apple accounted for a mere 3.54% of the total Indian smartphone market at the end of December 2022. It competes with other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Samsung, Xiaomi, Google, and Huawei in the smartphone segment in India.