iPhone exports from India will double to $2.5 billion yoy by March 2023

Apple’s iPhone exports from India have reached $1 billion in the five months since April as the country makes progress in its bid to become a major electronics manufacturing hub for Apple (via Bloomberg).

According to BloombergIndia’s sources say shipments of Indian-made iPhones to Europe and the Middle East will reach $2.5 billion by March 2023, nearly doubling the $1.3 billion worth of iPhones shipped to the country in the year to March 2022 has exported.

Though small by Chinese standards, India’s increasing iPhone output points to the strength of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s local manufacturing policies and Apple’s willingness to pump investment into the country as an alternative to China’s electronics hegemony. assembly and the disruptive geopolitical problems that accompany it.

“Apple’s healthy growth in production volume and exports shows that India is gradually taking a major foothold in the company’s China plus one strategy,” Navkendar Singh, an analyst at tech researcher IDC, told Bloomberg. “And for India, this is a big sign of the success of its financial stimulus scheme.”

Apple’s Taiwanese assembly partners Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron all have “iPhone” plants in India, producing the “iPhone” 11, iPhone 12, iPhone 13 and most recently iPhone 14 models. Apple recently announced that it had begun assembling the iPhone 14 in the country, while cutting the lag between Chinese and Indian exports from months to weeks.

By diversifying its production lines outside of China, Apple is playing a long game that won’t have a major impact on its supply chain for years to come. Bloomberg recently reported that it would take about eight years to move just 10% of Apple’s manufacturing capacity out of China, where about 98% of iPhones are still made.