When Rahul Gandhi publicly questioned what manufacturing was actually happening in India, he may not have anticipated that the answer would arrive in the form of a $70 billion freight-on-board (FOB) figure stamped, shipped, and delivered across the world with the words ‘Made in India’ on every box. Between FY22 and FY26, Apple Inc’s iPhone production in India has quietly scripted one of the most consequential manufacturing success stories in the country’s post-liberalisation history, and the numbers are no longer deniable.
Data shared by key vendors with the Indian government reveals that Apple, through its manufacturing partners Foxconn and Tata Electronics, is on track to touch $70 billion in cumulative FOB production value across the five-year window covered by the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme. Of this, exports alone account for $50 billion that is 70 per cent of total production value crossing Indian borders and reaching consumers in the United States, Europe, and beyond.
This is not a projection; it is happening. Financial Year 2025–26 alone is expected to contribute over $25 billion in FOB value, the highest ever in a single year, representing a 20 per cent jump over FY25’s $21 billion.
The trajectory is worth pausing over. When the PLI scheme commenced in FY22, iPhone production in India was a modest $2.5 billion a pilot, a toe in the water. By FY23, that figure had leapt to $7.5 billion. FY24 pushed it further to $13.8 billion.
And now, in the scheme’s final year, it is on course to nearly double that. This is not incremental growth; it is exponential scaling that places India firmly on the global electronics manufacturing map. The PLI scheme, widely dismissed by critics as a subsidy exercise, has demonstrably worked transforming India from a smartphone importer to one of the world’s most significant iPhone-producing nations in under half a decade.
The geopolitical context that turbocharged FY26 is equally instructive. When the United States imposed a 20 per cent fentanyl tax on Chinese imports in April 2024, India which faced zero duty on iPhone exports to the US suddenly held a decisive cost advantage. India already carried a 10 to 14 per cent cost disadvantage relative to China, partially cushioned by the PLI’s 4 to 6 per cent incentive. But the US tariff flipped the equation entirely, making India the more cost-effective production destination for iPhones destined for America. The result was dramatic: smartphone exports from India to the United States between April and December surged 182 per cent year-on-year, from $5.04 billion in the same period of FY25 to $14.1 billion in FY26. Apple did not merely talk about diversifying from China it acted, and India was ready.
This is precisely the manufacturing reality that gets lost in political noise. When opposition voices question whether India is producing anything of substance, or when ‘Make in India’ is lampooned as sloganeering, the $70 billion FOB figure cold, auditable, government-sourced stands as a rebuttal. These are not goods assembled in name only. These are iPhones that American consumers hold in their hands, manufactured in Chennai and Bengaluru, shipped from Indian ports, tracked in Indian export data. Tata Electronics, an entirely Indian company, is now among Apple’s most critical global suppliers a fact that would have seemed fanciful even five years ago.
The road ahead does carry caution flags. A US Supreme Court verdict declared the fentanyl tariff illegal, and Washington subsequently halved the duty, eroding the tariff advantage that India held over China. The PLI scheme itself expires at the end of March 2026, and its continuation currently under government consideration may be decisive in determining whether the current export momentum sustains or plateaus. Policy continuity will matter.
But what cannot be argued away is what India has already achieved. In five years, a country once dismissed as too bureaucratic, too costly, and too infrastructure-deficient for high-end electronics manufacturing has produced $70 billion worth of iPhones for the world. The phones are real. The exports are real. The manufacturing is real. Perhaps it is time the political conversation caught up with the data.
