Apple plans to shift the assembly of all “US-sold iPhones to India as soon as next year”, the Financial Times reported on Friday (April 25).
The tech giant sells more than 220 million iPhones a year worldwide, according to the global technological research and consulting firm Counterpoint Research. The United States is its biggest market. A fifth of total iPhone imports to the US currently comes from India, and the rest from China.
Apple says that its supply chain spans more than 50 countries and regions, but doesn’t provide details about the origins of its components. Where are India and China situated in the iPhone story? We explain.
How iPhone manufacturing came to China
The assembling of an iPhone is part of a larger manufacturing process.
Apple sources materials such as minerals and recycled parts, which are processed to create individual components such as metal enclosures or printed circuit boards. These are sent to the product assembly facilities and combined to build the finished products.
During his visit to China in March 2024, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “There’s no supply chain in the world that’s more critical to us than China.” China supplies many of the components, as well as the labour needed to build the high-value smartphones.
Apple entered China in the early 2000s. China was eager to deepen its economic integration with the rest of the world at the time, and Apple was looking to lower manufacturing costs by partnering with the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn.
Apple started out with the manufacturing of devices such as iPods, its now-discontinued series of portable media players. The iPhone was launched only in 2007.
China initially lacked the requisite systems and resources to manufacture the iPhone. “But Apple chose its own crop of suppliers and helped them grow into manufacturing superstars,” the BBC reported earlier this year.
The report quoted a supply chain expert who gave the example of a company named Beijing Jingdiao, which is now a “leading manufacturer of high-speed precision machinery”. This company, which developed machinery to cut glass, over time became “the star of Apple’s mobile phone surface processing”.
The Chinese government helped by providing various sops and tax benefits to Apple such as export-linked incentives, and by creating a special economic zone, which made Zhengzhou, in the central-eastern province of Henan, the “iPhone city”.
Zhengzhou is now the world’s biggest iPhone manufacturing site with more than 90 assembly lines. The New York Times reported in 2016 that it took about 400 steps to assemble the iPhone, including polishing, drilling and fitting screws, and the Zhengzhou facility could produce “500,000 iPhones a day, or roughly 350 a minute”.
In 2022, however, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had told suppliers to “plan more actively for assembling Apple products elsewhere in Asia, particularly India and Vietnam”. Other media published similar reports. There were multiple reasons for the change in Apple’s thinking.
The Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted global commerce and supply chains, was an important factor. China’s strict “Zero-Covid” policy effectively shut down entire cities if even a single case was detected.
Second, as the Chinese economy grew and education levels improved, “some Chinese youth are no longer eager to work for modest wages assembling electronics for the affluent”, The WSJ report said.
Media reports have long chronicled the dire working conditions in some plants, with “safety nets” installed near employee dormitories at a plant in Shenzhen to prevent worker deaths by suicide.
The trade tensions between the US and China began with President Trump’s first term that started in 2017. Trump has for long railed against the exodus of American manufacturing to China, and argued for high tariffs to discourage manufacturing abroad.
Where Apple’s iPhone assembly stands in India
Apple began the assembly of iPhones in India in 2017. There are currently three iPhone assembly plants in India – two in Tamil Nadu, and one in Karnataka. Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu is the biggest, with two large Foxconn plants. Apple’s other two contract manufacturers in India, Wistron and Pegatron, have been acquired by the Tata Group.
It has not all been smooth sailing. In 2021, workers at the Sriperumbudur plant protested against the poor work and living conditions in the plant and its hostel. The state government then wrote to Foxconn with suggestions for improving working conditions. In 2024, an investigation by Reuters found that the plant was turning away married women from working there “on the grounds they have more family responsibilities than their unmarried counterparts.”
Even so, smartphone manufacturing has grown significantly in India within a short time. The Indian government’s Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme has helped grow Apple’s manufacturing base in the country, as The Indian Express has earlier reported.
The scheme allows payments to companies if they meet a certain threshold of sales and investment targets. The government gave around $1 billion between 2022-23 to 2024-25 to 19 firms for smartphone manufacturing. This method has similarities to China’s model in Zhengzhou.
iPhone’s India story is part of a larger push for manufacturing smartphones in India. In 2023-24, India exported smartphones worth around $15 billion, and iPhones contributed to around two-thirds of this figure. Earlier this year, India became the world’s second biggest smartphone manufacturer.
Apple began the assembly of iPhones in India in 2017, with three plants in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. (Reuters) 
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