India eats China's lunch in US smartphone manufacturing
But overall sales are basically flat, says Canalys
For the first time, India has overtaken China as the top manufacturing hub for smartphones shipped to the US.
The latest figures from analyst house Canalys show that the number of smartphones Apple assembled in China dropped from 61 percent in Q2 last year to 25 percent in the second quarter of this year. Stepping in to plug the gap is India, which in the same period saw its share of US-bound smartphone shipments rise from 13 to 44 percent, while Vietnam also saw its share grow slightly from 24 percent to 30 percent.
"Apple has scaled up its production capacity in India over the last several years as a part of its 'China Plus One' strategy and has opted to dedicate most of its export capacity in India to supply the US market so far in 2025," wrote Sanyam Chaurasia, principal analyst at Canalys, in a press release.
"Samsung and Motorola have also increased their share of US-targeted supply from India, although their shifts are significantly slower and smaller in scale than Apple’s."
Apple is still dependent on China for volume production, Canalys opined, particularly for the iPhone 16 lineup, but it's clear there's a serious push to get manufacturing out of the Middle Kingdom and over to India as the trade war intensifies. Trump had threatened to hit Chinese imports with a 145 percent tariff, something Apple warned would hurt it to the tune of $900 million, but then the president chickened out and exempted smartphones.
Not that India's a particularly safe location either - President Trump has repeatedly said that he doesn't want Tim Apple to outsource manufacturing to India, but to instead bring production back to the US. Unfortunately, that runs into the economic logic that it's going to be cheaper to manufacture outside of the US unless you can persuade American workers to accept the wages and looser worker protection laws as found in other countries.
While Apple has committed to spending $500 billion on expanding manufacturing and research and development facilities in the US over the next four years, that's not on the assembly side. Apple's own plans say the investment program will create only 20,000 American jobs, nowhere near enough to begin volume iPhone assembly in the US - even if consumers would pay the vastly increased cost of such a made in America device.
It's not like the president is exactly eating his own dog food on this. The much-ballyhooed Trump Phone will most likely be made in China, after the website changed its advertising from "Made in America," to “American-Proud Design." The simple economics of labor costs and a shorter supply chain mean phone production isn't coming back to the US in the foreseeable future.
Regardless of where they're made, smartphones aren't exactly flying off the shelf in 2025. Canalys says that sales of such devices in the US are tepid at best, rising only 1 percent over the year-ago quarter. Apple sales fell 11 percent on a year-by-year basis, although Samsung saw the sales of its smartphones rise 38 percent. ®