US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariff system could lead to a major change in Apple’s supply chain, with the Cupertino-based tech giant planning to attach even more importance to India, according to a report in the Financial Times. Apple is reportedly looking to shift the assembly of all iPhones sold in the US to India as early as next year.
According to the report, Apple wants to double iPhone production in India to 80 million units to meet the demand of 60 million iPhones to be sold in the US by 2026.
Soon after President Trump‘s tariff announcement, Apple had lost around $700 billion in market value. Since then, the US government has exempted electronics items like smartphones from the tariffs, which came as good news for the tech giant, but a separate 20% tariff is still in place on China to curb the export of fentanyl.
Apple’s India push:
Apple had manufactured the iPhone 15 models in India last year, and the tech giant extended this to the iPhone 16 Pro series last year. Earlier this month, India’s 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 trying to shift its dependence on China at least since the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shutdowns in 2020. In this effort, the tech giant had been slowly shifting its focus to India with its three iPhone assembly plants: two run by the Tata group and one by Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn.
Even before the introduction of reciprocal tariffs, Apple had started encouraging its suppliers from China, Japan, Taiwan and other countries to set up manufacturing facilities in India. Some key suppliers had also started production in India, including Sunwoda (battery packs), Foxlink (cables) and Aequs (cases).
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.
