The value of Made in India iPhones tripled in Apple’s last fiscal year, according to a new report today, which says the country accounted for $7B worth of the company’s smartphones.
That represents an even bigger increase in the percentage of iPhones made in India, from just 1% in 2021 to almost 7% today …
Background
The need for Apple to reduce its dependence on China as a manufacturing center has been clear for many years, but the impact of the pandemic at the world’s biggest iPhone assembly plant really underlined the problem. The COVID-19-related disruption was estimated to have cost the company a billion dollars per week.
India is seen as Apple’s main hope when it comes to relocating production outside of China. A report last year suggested that a quarter of all iPhones could be made in India by 2025, and a later one indicated that this could rise to half of all iPhones by 2027.
Apple started slowly, its suppliers originally making only the first-gen iPhone SE in the country, and only models for local sale. Today, even some of the latest iPhone 14 models are made in India, and a growing percentage of production is exported for sale in the US and elsewhere.
For the iPhone 15, Apple is hoping that assembly will begin in China and India simultaneously. We learned last month that a new Foxconn plant in India looks set to be about half the size of the massive iPhone assembly facility in Zhengzhou, China – colloquially known as iPhone City.
Growth of Made in India iPhones
Bloomberg reports that Apple has made a lot of progress in the past couple of years.
Apple Inc. assembled more than $7 billion of iPhones in India last fiscal year, tripling production in the world’s fastest-growing smartphone arena after accelerating a move beyond China.
The US company now makes almost 7% of its iPhones in India through expanding partners from Foxconn Technology Group to Pegatron Corp., people familiar with the matter said. That’s a significant leap for India, which accounted for an estimated 1% of the world’s iPhones in 2021.
Of that $7B worth, the majority of it – accounting for some $5B – was exported.
Alongside increasing exports, Apple is also selling more of its products than ever within India. A recent market intelligence report said that iPad shipments in India more than doubled in the final quarter of last year.
After many years of planning and negotiations, the first two Apple Stores in India are set to open next week – with some 22 competing brands banned from an exclusion zone around at least one of them.
Photo: Yash Bhardwaj/Unsplash
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