Analysts expect India to supply 25 percent of Apple’s iPhones by 2027
Mobile phones have now eclipsed diamonds as India’s leading export product. Currently, about 15% of Apple’s iPhones are manufactured in India, but projections from JPMorgan and Bank of America analysts suggest this figure will rise to 25% by 2027. Worldwide, Apple shipped approximately 232 million iPhones in 2024, as reported by International Data Corporation (IDC).
Michael Acton and John Reed for Financial Times:
“If you have an anchor firm like Apple coming in and placing… eggs in the India basket, that’s a positive sign,” says Konark Bhandari, a fellow with Carnegie India. “It’s a big signal to other companies that you can do business with some ease here — and also establishes a strong linkage with a downstream manufacturing firm, which wasn’t the case earlier.”
For Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook, the geopolitics surrounding the shift are tricky. Apple — which is intensely secretive about its supply chain — needs to be wary of antagonising China, on which it still overwhelmingly depends.
Complicating matters further is the chilly relationship between Beijing and New Delhi. In a sign of the secrecy and political sensitivities, officials in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu refer to Apple even in private conversations as “the fruit company”…
[I]f Apple is to put down deep roots in India, it will need a supply base there to rival its vast network in China.
The iPhones currently made in India are still largely assembled using flown-in parts. To become more ambitious and bolster Apple’s long-term presence, manufacturers of components will have to be lured to the country with similar revenue opportunities as those found in China.
MacDailyNews Take: How to extricate a massive operation, at least in meaningful part, out from under an autocratic CCP without them noticing too much to really turn the screws before you free enough production capacity? Therein lies the rub.
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