Tim Cook's Last Day As Apple CEO Hands India's Manufacturing Bet To A Hardware Engineer

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Today is Tim Cook's last day as chief executive of Apple. John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, takes over on 1 September, a transition Apple announced on 20 April and its board approved unanimously.

Cook becomes executive chairman of Apple's board. In that role, the company said, he will engage with policymakers around the world. Bloomberg has reported his focus will include Apple's relationships with the Trump administration and the Chinese government. Arthur Levinson, non-executive chairman for the past fifteen years, becomes lead independent director on the same date, and Ternus joins the board.

Ternus, 50, joined Apple in 2001 on the product design team, became vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and senior vice president in January 2021. He oversaw the Mac's shift from Intel processors to Apple's own silicon and has worked across the iPhone, iPad, AirPods and Apple Watch lines. His first public outing as chief executive is Apple's "Surprise and shine" event on 9 September, which he will lead and at which Cook is not expected to appear.

For India, the timing matters more than the ceremony. An official at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology told Business Standard that Apple is expected to move 30 to 35 per cent of global iPhone production to India over the next five years, up from about 25 per cent now. That would lift the annual value of India's iPhone output from roughly $25 billion to between $40 billion and $45 billion by 2031.

Cook took over in August 2011, two months before Steve Jobs died, at a company then worth close to $350 billion.

Cook's India record usually gets filed under supply chain. It reads more accurately as negotiation.

Apple became the largest beneficiary of the ₹30,000-crore mobile phone PLI scheme launched in April 2020, producing iPhones worth close to $70 billion in India over five years. Getting there took things engineering cannot deliver. Business Standard reports that Apple successfully lobbied to have a clause dropped that would have valued imported second-hand Chinese machinery at a discount, which mattered because that valuation set the base for its vendors' incremental investment under PLI. The government separately relaxed the 30 per cent local sourcing requirement for single-brand retail. Apple also absorbed refusals. In 2022, India declined to let BYD set up an iPad factory in the aftermath of the Galwan clashes, and the project went to Vietnam instead. Around a dozen Chinese joint venture proposals were dropped.

That is a decade of political work, and it is now the explicit content of Cook's new job. Apple has effectively carved its government-relations function into a standalone executive chairmanship. For India, that reads as reassuring rather than alarming.

The exposure sits elsewhere. Ternus is a product engineer, and manufacturing geography follows from product and cost decisions rather than leading them. Roughly 80 per cent of Apple's suppliers, more than 200 companies, remain in China, which still assembles three of every four iPhones. An engineer optimising for build quality and component economics may weigh that balance differently.

The wider question is who India's industrial policy is actually betting on.

With the mobile PLI scheme having ended in FY26, the government has committed ₹62,500 crore over five years to a successor package. Most of that is expected to reach Apple's suppliers and contract manufacturers. It is a substantial public commitment, and it rests on a corporate strategy a departing executive built and that his successor has not yet had to defend under pressure.

This is the same structure that appeared in Ola Electric's PLI sanction this week. Indian industrial policy increasingly writes multi-year commitments against decisions taken in boardrooms it does not sit in. That is not an argument against the incentives, which have plainly worked. India went from assembling almost no iPhones to roughly a quarter of global output in about five years, and Apple is now the country's largest mobile phone exporter. It is an argument for reading the exposure honestly.

There is a demand-side story that gets less attention and is sturdier. India's super-premium segment accounts for about 6 per cent of Apple's global iPhone shipments and is growing in double digits quarter on quarter. The iPhone leads the Indian market on value share and sits in the top five by volume. That gives Apple a reason to stay that has nothing to do with subsidies.

Two caveats worth keeping in view. A move from 25 per cent to 30-35 per cent across five years is a gentle slope rather than a step change, and independent estimates differ. Smart Analytics Global put India at 23 per cent of global iPhone manufacturing in 2025 against China's 74 per cent, and projected 28 per cent this year. Different methodologies, so the figures are directional.

The harder constraint has not moved either. China's supplier density, logistics and skilled labour cannot be reproduced at speed. India's next third of iPhone production is a materially harder problem than its first quarter was.

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