The Bloomberg article on iPhone manufacturing in India raises a fair point, but I think the bigger picture is more interesting.
India’s mobile phone production has grown from around ₹18,000 crore in 2015 to ₹6.27 lakh crore in 2026. Mobile phone exports have also gone from just ₹1,500 crore to around ₹2.59 lakh crore. The government says around ₹19,000 crore has been paid as incentives under the production-linked incentive scheme, while the sector has generated around ₹3 lakh crore in GST, 25 lakh jobs in electronics and 12 lakh jobs in mobile manufacturing.
So it is difficult to argue that the policy has not worked. India has clearly built a much larger manufacturing and export base than it had a decade ago.
At the same time, domestic value addition is still around 23 percent, which means a large part of the components still comes from outside India.
So I think there is still a lot more to do. India has made significant progress in getting companies to manufacture and assemble phones here. The next challenge is getting more of the actual components and higher-value parts of the supply chain here as well.
