India Could Make a Third of the World's iPhones as John Ternus Takes Over at Apple

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Tim Cook hands over as Apple's chief executive on Monday, taking the role of executive chairman while John Ternus moves into the corner office. He leaves behind an India that assembles roughly one in four iPhones sold worldwide — a position that did not exist when he first visited in 2016.

The government expects that share to grow substantially. "In the next five years, we expect Apple to shift about 30-35 per cent of its global iPhone production to India from 25 per cent currently," a MeitY official said, adding that annual production value could climb from $25 billion in FY26 to around $40-45 billion by FY31.

New money is already on the table. With the ₹30,000 crore mobile PLI scheme having run its course in FY26, the government has notified a fresh ₹62,500 crore incentive package covering the next five years, and extended tax exemptions for contract manufacturing until 31 March 2041. Apple's vendors are expected to be the largest beneficiaries.

The more interesting question is what changes under a hardware engineer. Dipanjan Chatterjee, principal analyst at Forrester, said Ternus understands the product and engineering side of the supply chain in a way that could push Apple beyond assembly toward a deeper manufacturing ecosystem in India. He also expects a focus on what he calls accessible premiumisation, which matters in a price-sensitive market.

India is already Apple's fastest-growing meaningful market. Super-premium phones account for about 6 percent of its global iPhone shipments, growing in double digits quarter on quarter, and the iPhone now leads India on value share while sitting in the top five by volume.

The relationship worked because both sides were unusually pragmatic about it, and the receipts are specific. During the pandemic, when Foxconn and Wistron needed Chinese technical staff to commission Indian factories and both countries were locked down, the government arranged special Air India flights between China and India, organised freight to move second-hand machinery, and coordinated visas across MeitY and the external affairs ministry. One Apple vendor described it as a whole-of-government approach.

The flexibility ran the other way too. Apple lobbied successfully to drop a clause that would have valued imported second-hand Chinese machinery at a discount when calculating vendors' incremental investment under PLI. The government separately relaxed the 30 percent local sourcing requirement under single-brand retail rules. Neither concession is small, and neither was granted to everyone.

Apple gave ground where it had to. In 2022 it wanted BYD to set up an iPad plant in India; New Delhi declined in the aftermath of Galwan, and the project went to Vietnam. Apple also dropped roughly a dozen proposed Chinese joint ventures in India. Cook, for his part, committed $600 billion to US servers and semiconductors and kept Indian-made phones exporting into the US at zero duty through a volatile tariff period.

That last part is the fragile bit. Much of what protected India was a chief executive with two decades of political capital spending it deliberately. Ternus starts with none of that.

The number worth watching is not 35 percent. It is the composition of the roughly 40 companies now in Apple's Indian supplier network, which include the Tata Group and Aditya Birla Group alongside the Taiwanese contract manufacturers. A MeitY official made the point directly: the precision-engineering capability being built for iPhones is expected to feed aerospace, robotics and defence. That is the actual return India is underwriting with ₹62,500 crore — not phone assembly, but a tooling and tolerance culture that transfers to industries where India has struggled to compete.

Whether it transfers is unproven. Assembly teaches process discipline and volume management. It does not automatically teach component design, materials science or the ability to hold a specification across thousands of units without a foreign customer dictating it. China took two decades to make that leap, and did it partly through domestic firms that eventually competed with their own customers. India's supplier base is a fraction of the size and considerably younger.

For Indian founders in hardware and deep tech, this is the most consequential industrial policy story running. A functioning precision-manufacturing base changes what is buildable domestically — it is the difference between designing a robot in Bengaluru and having to source every actuator from Shenzhen. The Apple ecosystem is the most plausible route India has to that base, which makes the aerospace-and-defence spillover claim worth holding the government to.

The risk is concentration. A manufacturing story anchored to one American company's product cycle, one CEO's political capital and one tariff regime is not diversification, it is a different dependency. Counterpoint's framing of Ternus's job as a continuous negotiation between China's depth, India's growth and US commitments is exactly right — and India controls only one of those three variables.

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