Apple India iPhone output triples to $7 billion in last fiscal

Apple tripled production in India, assembled over $7 billion of iPhones in India last fiscal year, accelerating a move beyond China.

With help from Foxconn Technology Group to Pegatron Corp Apple Inc. makes almost 7% of its iPhones in India. That’s a significant leap for India, which accounted for an estimated 1% of the world’s iPhones in 2021.

Apple is trying to avoid 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.

Out 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 comment.