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.
Apple is exploring ways to reduce its reliance on China as tensions between Washington and Beijing continue to escalate. Its longtime partners, who make most of the world's iPhones from sprawling factories in China, have added assembly lines at a rapid pace over the past year, the people said, declining to be named as the information isn't public.
The world's most valuable company struggled last year with chaos at Foxconn's main “iPhone City” complex in Zhengzhou, which drove home vulnerabilities in Apple's supply chain and forced it to cut output estimates. At the same time, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has dished out a spate of incentives to boost local manufacturing.
Apple shares rose 1.1% at 9:31 a.m. in New York.
Of the total production, Apple exported $5 billion of iPhones in the year ended March 2023, nearly four times as much as the previous period, the people said. Apple will likely try to manufacture the next iPhones in India at the same time as in China, sometime in the fall of 2023. If so, that will be the first time that iPhone assembly begins concurrently in the two countries. And if the aggressive expansion of its suppliers continues, Apple could assemble a quarter of all its iPhones in India by 2025. Representatives for the US company declined to
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