The news: Apple assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, roughly a quarter of everything it built worldwide. Output rose 53% in a year.
India exported $22 billion of iPhones in the fiscal year through March. That makes the iPhone the country's largest branded export, ahead of diamonds.
Bloomberg and Reuters reported in April last year that Apple aimed to build most of its US-bound iPhones in India by the end of 2026. Three years ago, almost all of them came from China.
What changed: Apple was already assembling iPhones in India, and India’s subsidy scheme was already paying out, when a crisis at a single plant changed the pace.
In late 2022, lockdowns and worker protests at Foxconn's Zhengzhou complex cut iPhone 14 Pro output in the middle of the holiday quarter, and Apple warned shipments would fall. The campus had assembled most of the world's iPhones since opening in 2010, and the arrangement failed inside a single quarter.
India’s share climbed steeply from there, because three pieces were in place:
Tata Electronics had no consumer-electronics manufacturing history three years ago. But it bought Wistron’s India plant in 2023, took 60% of Pegatron’s India unit last year and built its own campus at Hosur. Its Apple workforce grew from 15,000 to 75,000, and it has passed Foxconn as India's largest iPhone exporter.
Final assembly is also the step with the least fixed capital behind it. An assembly line takes a fraction of the cost and lead time of a display fab or a chip plant, which is why it could move in three years.
The backdrop: Tariffs are the reason usually given for the move, but the duties actually imposed largely missed the product.
India briefly carried a 50% US tariff from late August 2025, the highest rate on any country. But smartphones sat inside the electronics exclusions.
The Supreme Court then struck down the authority behind those tariffs in February. Apple got back what it had paid on other shipments, so the exemption never covered its whole product line.
The threat still moved the freight: by mid-2025, 97% of Foxconn India's exports went to the US, up from about half, a year earlier. India had also overtaken China as the biggest source of US smartphone imports.
A pending Section 232 review of semiconductor imports could still reach finished phones. And the Section 301 tariff already in force on India carves smartphones out by an annex exclusion USTR can narrow.
The details: Three constraints hit the India operation before the iPhone 17 ramp, and none came from a published US or Chinese rule:
Foxconn recalled hundreds of Chinese engineers in two waves.
Chinese authorities declined to approve exports of specialized iPhone manufacturing equipment bound for India.
A rare-earth magnet shortage hit Foxconn's AirPods operation in Hyderabad while China's export-licensing regime for the magnets applied worldwide, though Foxconn said production was unaffected because it ran on existing stock.
Apple worked around all three: Taiwanese and Vietnamese engineers replaced the Chinese ones at higher cost, and India began fast-tracking visas for foreign technicians. So the iPhone 17 shipped on time, and all four models were built in India from launch day, a first outside China.
The components did not follow the assembly lines: local content in an India-built iPhone passed 20% last year, up from single digits in 2020. But the accounting counts assembling imported battery packs and chargers as Indian content. The display is Korean, the processor is Taiwanese, and the camera module is neither.
That parts base is what India is trying to build now, under a separate scheme from the expired smartphone subsidy. The incentive was raised to about $4.5 billion, with 75 projects approved.
Foxconn is putting $1.5 billion into a display-module plant near Chennai. Corning opened a cover-glass line in December. A Foxconn venture with HCL starts packaging and testing display-driver chips in 2027.
Apple’s suppliers in India also shipped $2.5 billion of components to China last year. Amitabh Kant, the former head of India’s policy think tank, said that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.
The counter: Three years is not a fair window to judge a components base, because display fabs, chip packaging and camera-module lines run on five-to-ten-year build cycles.
The first foldable iPhone, reportedly out next month, will be built in China, so the newest product still goes to the oldest supply base. And the subsidy that funded the ramp has expired with no replacement announced.
If assembly automates and headcount halves, the labor advantage that drew the work counts for less.
My view: Apple moved the easiest part of its supply chain. And it did that better than anyone expected: standing up assembly in a new country in three years is a real operational achievement.
But the risk that started all of this was the parts base, and that has not moved at the same speed.
What happened before the iPhone 17 ramp is the useful evidence: engineers were recalled, machinery was held, a magnet shortage hit. And none of it required a rule aimed at Apple. A supply chain that assembles in India and sources from China is still exposed to the same decisions.
Apple’s own American Manufacturing Program is directed at US component capacity, not Indian component capacity. That suggests the company treats the parts problem as a different problem from the assembly one.
