US President Donald Trump’s so called reciprocal tarriffs system could lead to a major change in Apple’s supply change with the Cupertino based tech giant planning to give an even more importance to India, according to a Financial Times report. Apple is reportedly looking to shift the assembly of all its iPhones sold in the US to India as early as next year.
As per the report, Apple is looking to double the iPhone production output in India to 80 million units in order to meet the requirement of 60 million iPhones sold in the US by 2026.
Soon after President Trump’s tarriff announcement, Apple had lost around $700 billion in market value. Since then US government hasd excempted electronics items like smartphones from its tarriffs, signalling good news for the tech giant but still a 20% separate duty applied on China to restirct the export of fentanyl.
Apple’s India push:
Apple had manufacured the iPhone 15 models in India last year and the tech giant extended that to even the iPhone 16 Pro lineup last year. Earlier this month, Indian IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had also revealed that Apple exported 1.5 trillion rupees (about $17.4 billion) of iPhones made in India in the fiscal year ending March 2025.
Notably, Apple has been looking to shift its reliance on China at least since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shutdowns. In that effort the tech giant had slowly shifting the emphasis to India with its three iPhone assembly plants: two run by Tata goup and one run by Taiwanese contract manufacture Foxconn.
Even prior to the implementation of reciprocal tarriffs, Apple had started encouraging its suppliers from China, Japan, Taiwan and other countries to set up manufacturing facilities in India. Some major suppliers had also began production in India including Sunwoda (battery packs), Foxlink (cables) and Aequs (enclosures).
Meanwhile, Apple has been busy expanding its supply ecosystem in India over the past few years. According to an earlier report, Apple’s local content for various models was around 5-8% when it started manufacturing in India at the start of the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme in 2020, but this has now jumped to around 20% for various models.
