Lenovo has started the local production of smartphones with Flextronics under a contract manufacturing deal at its Sriperumbudur plant, reports the Hindu. As of now, the facility is making Lenovo-owned Motorola's Moto E smartphones and will starting making the K3 Note smartphone soon. Overall Lenovo plans to manufacture six million units of smartphones by both Motorola and Lenovo during this fiscal. The production campus for Lenovo will have over 1,500 employees for quality assurance, manufacturing lines and product testing etc. Lenovo and Motorola will both have their own separate manufacturing lines in the same facility. The Indian government has been encouraging domestic companies to start manufacturing electronics goods within the country instead of importing them and had approved a National Policy on Electronics. The National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council (NMCC) had also proposed the creation of a $1 billion fund to encourage telecom equipment manufacturing in India. The Cabinet had approved the setting up of two semiconductor wafer fabrication units at a cost of Rs 63,412 crore in India, in February last year. Since then, various smartphone manufacturers have said they will start manufacturing in India or have already started doing so. - In June, homegrown mobile phone maker Celkon opened its first manufacturing unit in the country in Telangana. The company mentioned that about 60% of the phones manufactured at this plant would be feature phones and the remaining 40% would be smartphones. - The same month, Taiwanese electronics contract manufacturing company Foxconn said that it would start making Xiaomi phones…
