Apple Now Assembles 14% of iPhones in India
Apple now produces as much as 14% of its iPhones in India, indicating the company's accelerating efforts to diversify beyond China (via Bloomberg).
The figure accounts for $14 billion of assembled iPhones in the country, or about 1 in 7 of the company's flagship devices, a doubling of production compared to the last fiscal year. Models assembled in India include the iPhone 12 through to the latest iPhone 15, excluding premium Pro and Pro Max models.
Apple has been setting up iPhone manufacturing hubs in India ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi began promoting his "Made in India" initiative, which requires that 30% of products sold by foreign companies be manufactured or produced within the country.
The Indian government says the growth in manufacturing has created 150,000 direct jobs at Apple's suppliers. That's a boon for Modi's administration, which has enticed foreign companies like Apple with financial incentives to realize its ambition for the country to become a global manufacturing hub.
Foxconn assembled nearly 67% and Pegatron around 17% of iPhones in India in the fiscal year ending March 2024, according to Bloomberg's sources. The remaining devices were produced by Wistron.
While China remains Apple's largest iPhone assembly base and biggest overseas market, it is also where Apple's revenues have been plummeting, due to the meteoric rise of local vendors such as Huawei and a government ban on the use of iPhones in state workplaces.
Apple's diversification away from China hints at the company's growing awareness of rising geopolitical tensions and the need for supply chain resilience in the face of potential disruption. The pivot to India also likely takes into account its fast-growing smartphone market – last year Apple also opened its first two stores there, in Mumbai and the capital New Delhi.
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Top Rated Comments
* Foxconn employs hundreds of thousands of workers and houses them in dormitories on site. That gives those companies the ability to ramp up and ramp down production at a moment's notice; workers deal with conditions most US and EU laborers would consider extremely difficult. The company literally owns you. But the end result is a level of speed and flexibility US and EU factories would have difficulty matching.
* China/East Asia is very good at churning out associate-level engineers who are needed to help overcome manufacturing and design challenges. Jobs noted that Apple needed 30,000 industrial engineers to support the factories at the time and that Apple would never be able to hire at that level in the US without major changes to our education system and a concerted push of people into STEM fields.
* China/East Asia has built up a huge supply chain whereby the majority of the components that go into an iPhone are produced in the same general area, reducing shipping costs. (Corning's various Gorilla Glass and its variants are one of the few US-sourced components that get sent to China for processing).