The Government of India today announced some “radical” set of changes to its Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Policy across various sectors, including a major change to Single Brand Retail Trading.
The Government of India and Apple have been in some sort of a game of See-saw, with the possibility of company-run Apple Stores in the country hanging in the balance. The Cupertino based company has been keen on opening its stores in the country and over the last several months, they’ve almost been stuck in a system of ‘one step forward, two steps back’, thanks to India’s policies. Apple was last reported as saying that there would be no Apple Stores possible unless the 30% local sourcing norms went away.
Thankfully, India seems to have somewhat loosened its policies. As part of its announcement today, it has included the following change for Single Brand Retail Trading:
It has now been decided to relax local sourcing norms up to three years and a relaxed sourcing regime for another five years for entities undertaking Single Brand Retail Trading of products having ‘state-of-art’ and ‘cutting edge’ technology.
The ball seems to be in Apple’s court yet again.