India is slowly but steadily building up its electronics manufacturing muscle.
India now accounts for roughly half of all smartphones imported into the United States, up from essentially zero just a few years ago. The data around one of the more dramatic supply chain reversals of the last decade was from USITC and Morgan Stanley Research, and shared by former TechCrunch reporter Manish Singh.
In 2018, China supplied about 80% of the smartphones the US imported, with Vietnam, South Korea and the rest of the world making up most of the remainder. India didn’t register at all. By 2023 and 2024, China’s share had started to slip modestly, while India crept up to single digits. Then came 2025 — India’s share jumped to roughly 40%, overtaking China outright. In the year-to-date numbers for 2026, India’s share has climbed to around 52%, while China’s has collapsed to roughly 22%.
This isn’t a gradual, decade-long shift. Most of it has happened in the space of about 18 months. Here’s how it happened.
Apple Moved Its Assembly Lines To India, Fast
The single biggest driver behind this chart is Apple. The iPhone is the highest-value smartphone import into the US by a wide margin, and Apple has been racing to shift the phones it sells in America away from Chinese assembly lines and onto Indian ones.
Apple assembled around 55 million iPhones in India in 2025, up from about 36 million the year before, taking India’s share of Apple’s global iPhone output to roughly a quarter. Tim Cook has said the majority of iPhone demand in the US is now met by India-assembled units, and Apple’s own internal plans reportedly call for most iPhones sold in the US to come from India by the end of 2026 — which would mean roughly doubling India output to more than 80 million units a year. Crucially, Apple is no longer just building older, lower-margin iPhones in India. The full iPhone 17 lineup, including the Pro and Pro Max, is now assembled there, a segment that stayed in China as recently as the iPhone 15 generation.
This mirrors a broader trend — global electronics brands increasingly choosing to build for the US market out of India rather than China. Google’s Pixel phones and Nokia’s broadband devices are among the products that have followed a similar playbook of partnering with Indian manufacturers like Dixon to localise production.
Tata Electronics And Foxconn Built The Factories To Make It Possible
None of this would be possible without the physical capacity to assemble tens of millions of phones a year, and that’s where India’s contract manufacturers come in.
Tata Electronics, a relatively new entrant that didn’t exist in this business a few years ago, has expanded aggressively — its workforce has grown from around 15,000 to roughly 75,000 in about two years, and it has overtaken Foxconn to become Apple’s largest contract manufacturer in India. Its Hosur, Tamil Nadu plant, which used to only make iPhone enclosures, now runs full assembly lines producing the iPhone 16 and 16e, with plans to scale further. Tata has also acquired a majority stake in Pegatron’s Chennai plant, consolidating its position as India’s answer to Foxconn.
Foxconn itself hasn’t stood still. It’s investing billions more into India, building a new facility near Bengaluru designed to produce close to 20 million iPhones a year, and has started making iPhone enclosures locally too — a step that used to be Tata’s exclusive turf. Between Tata, Foxconn and Pegatron, India now runs five separate iPhone production sites.
Trump’s Tariffs On China Gave The Shift Urgency
The move away from China had already begun during Covid-era supply chain disruptions, but it went into overdrive once the Trump administration’s tariff policy targeted Chinese imports. Reciprocal tariffs on Chinese goods climbed as high as 125%, and while smartphones were eventually granted exclusions from those specific duties, a separate 20% tariff tied to fentanyl-related trade action stayed in place on Chinese electronics. iPhones assembled in India, by contrast, faced no such penalty.
That gap in tariff treatment made India’s cost advantage over China explicit rather than theoretical, and Apple and its suppliers responded by accelerating shipments. In a single month in early 2025, Apple reportedly shipped around 600 tons of iPhones worth roughly $2 billion from India to the US — a monthly record at the time, and a sign of how quickly the reallocation was happening even before the big 2025-2026 jump visible in the chart.
India’s Government Incentives Did The Groundwork Years In Advance
The tariff shock accelerated a shift that India’s government had been laying the foundation for since 2020, through the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for large-scale electronics manufacturing. The scheme offers manufacturers a 4-6% rebate on incremental sales of phones made in India, specifically structured to reward companies for scaling up production rather than just showing up.
That policy groundwork is also why smartphones didn’t just grow as an import story for the US — they became a major Indian export story in their own right. Smartphones had overtaken motor gasoline to become India’s fourth-largest export less than a decade after India barely manufactured any phones domestically at all. The same underlying infrastructure — PLI incentives, a growing base of contract manufacturers, and government courtship of global brands — that built that export story is what let India absorb Apple’s shift away from China so quickly when tariffs made the timing urgent.
What The Rest Of The Chart Shows
While Apple and India dominate the headline number, the chart also shows Vietnam holding a fairly steady 15-20% share across the years, largely reflecting Samsung’s manufacturing base there, and South Korea and the “Rest of World” category remaining minor players throughout. China’s collapse from ~80% to ~22% in eight years is really the mirror image of India’s rise — the two are, for the most part, the same story told from opposite ends.
For India, this is a rare case of geopolitics, government policy, and corporate risk management all pulling in the same direction at the same time. Whether that 52% share keeps climbing toward Apple’s stated goal of “most” US iPhones being India-made, or plateaus once the current round of tariff-driven urgency settles, will be the thing to watch through the rest of 2026.