To Chennai from Cupertino: How Tim ‘cooked’ Apple's India recipe

As Tim Cook’s 15-year run as Apple’s CEO ends, India stands out as one of the clearest examples of his signature approach to business of making the supply chain work first, then making it bigger and more resilient.

When Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, he inherited a company whose manufacturing machine was already heavily concentrated in China. He leaves behind an Apple that makes a significant share of its iPhones in India and is considering expanding production there to other products. This change began as an exploratory move but its logic has become clearer with every passing year.

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When a supply-chain man replaced product wizard Steve Jobs

Cook was an unusual choice to succeed Jobs because he was not a product visionary as his expertise was operations. An industrial engineer by training, Cook spent 12 years at IBM before moving to Intelligent Electronics and then Compaq, where he was responsible for procurement and inventory management.

Jobs recruited him to Apple in 1998. Within months, Cook began radically tightening Apple's operations. One measure of the change was inventory: Apple cut the amount of inventory it held from about 30 days to six days.

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Cook also pushed Apple away from owning a sprawling manufacturing infrastructure and towards a tightly managed network of specialist suppliers. He cultivated a smaller group of suppliers, coordinated production more closely and eliminated unnecessary movement of components and finished products.

This helped because Apple's competitive advantage depended on producing huge quantities of complex devices with remarkably little inventory sitting idle. Jobs was the person who decided what Apple should make, and Cook became the executive who knew how to make the machine producing those products faster, cheaper and more reliably.

This explains why Jobs recommended Cook as his successor. When Cook became CEO in 2011, the board was not hiring a replacement Steve Jobs but getting an executive who already knew Apple's operations intimately and had repeatedly run the company while Jobs was away for medical treatment.

Cook subsequently scaled that operating philosophy enormously. Apple's annual revenue rose from $108 billion in fiscal 2011 to $416 billion in fiscal 2025 while its market value increased from roughly $350 billion to around $4.5 trillion. India is one very visible chapter in this larger story.

Apple's India strategy began as a market problem

It is tempting to tell the story as if Cook arrived in India with a grand plan to create Apple's second manufacturing powerhouse after China. But the actual history is more interesting.

In 2016, India was still a difficult market for Apple. The company had a tiny overall smartphone share even though it dominated the premium segment. Its sales were also constrained by high import duties that made iPhones expensive.

When Cook met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May 2016, manufacturing was discussed. But early reports suggest that Apple was not initially eager to make a major manufacturing commitment. Cook was also seeking permission to sell certified pre-owned iPhones, while PM Modi was pushing Apple towards manufacturing in India.

The economics eventually made local assembly attractive. Producing phones in India could reduce the tax burden on devices sold locally while giving Apple a way to build a longer-term manufacturing presence in a market Cook believed could resemble China's earlier growth trajectory.

Apple subsequently asked its manufacturing partners to explore Indian production. By early 2017, Taiwan's Wistron was preparing a Bengaluru facility.

Apple's first tiny India step

Apple did not begin by moving its newest and most complicated iPhones to India. In May 2017, Wistron began assembling the iPhone SE in Bengaluru. The SE was an older, lower-priced model that had been launched globally in 2016. The choice reflected Apple's desire to increase its share in a fast-growing market where cheaper phones dominated. That looked like a savvy supply-chain experiment.

Apple could test Indian factories, workers, suppliers and logistics without immediately putting its most important new product launch at risk. The company could also use production to serve Indian customers and learn how much of its existing manufacturing system could be reproduced locally.

Cook later said Apple was really happy with how the Indian SE production was going and compared India's opportunity to where China had been several years earlier. The significance was not the few SEs coming off a Bengaluru line but that Apple had established a beachhead after all.

From assembly line to manufacturing ecosystem

The next step was to deepen the ecosystem. Apple gradually added models and manufacturing partners. Wistron moved beyond the SE, while Foxconn and Pegatron eventually expanded their Indian operations. The Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) programme introduced by the Indian government in 2020 became the prime mover behind Apple's shift to India as it gave Apple suppliers a highly lucrative reason to invest and increase output.

Tata then acquired Wistron's Indian operations and took a larger role in Apple's manufacturing network. Tata now operates multiple facilities, while Foxconn has built a huge production presence in Tamil Nadu.

In the next few years, the scale changed dramatically. Apple began producing the latest iPhone generation in India alongside China, with Indian factories capable of making even the Pro models for global markets. That is a very different proposition from assembling an old iPhone SE for Indian buyers. Apple’s iPhone was the single most valuable export from India in 2025 with as much as $23 billion of the devices being shipped out from factories in the country, mostly to the US.

Why Tim Cook proved to be prescient about India

For years, Apple had an extraordinarily efficient China-centred manufacturing system. The problem was that efficiency and resilience may not be the same thing. China offered Apple an ecosystem that was extremely difficult to replicate elsewhere. Thousands of suppliers were clustered around giant assembly plants, allowing Apple to manufacture hundreds of millions of devices while carrying very little inventory. This concentration was one reason diversification was so difficult.

Cook nevertheless began adding alternatives. India became the major alternative for iPhones while Vietnam became increasingly important for other Apple products. Apple had invested billions in Vietnam and came to support roughly 200,000 jobs there. Vietnamese factories were producing iPads, AirPods and Apple Watches while suppliers were also making components for Macs.

The US-China trade confrontation intensified during the Trump administration. Then came COVID lockdowns and the disruption at Foxconn's enormous Zhengzhou plant. Apple suddenly had a powerful reason to accelerate a strategy that had previously looked like prudent risk management.

By 2025, the geographical division was becoming highly visible. Apple said most iPhones sold in the US would be sourced from India, while most iPads, Macs and Apple Watches for the US market would come from Vietnam.

India and Vietnam had therefore moved from being a market-serving assembly base to being a strategic export platform.

Apple's deeper supply chain strategy

Cook's supply-chain transformation was not simply about moving factories from China to other countries. Apple has increasingly tried to build redundancy deeper in the chain, including components, semiconductors and manufacturing equipment. Its Apple Silicon strategy gave it greater control over processor design while partnerships with semiconductor manufacturers reduced dependence on any one production geography.

The same logic is now visible in the US, where Apple has committed enormous sums towards domestic chip and component production. But India is arguably the cleaner example of how Cook approached diversification by starting small, proving the model and then adding capacity.

India is also moving up the value chain itself. Indian electronics manufacturing is moving beyond finished products and into modules and components, with PCBs, enclosures, speakers, antennas, optical transceivers and filters now being made in the country. That's important for Apple because a factory is only as strong as the supplier network around it.

From iPhones to Macs and iPads?

The next test of Cook's India strategy could therefore be whether the country can move beyond the iPhone. The idea is not entirely new. Apple explored moving some iPad production to India as early as 2021, but that effort ran into difficulties and some iPad manufacturing eventually went to Vietnam. In 2023, Apple still had no immediate plans to make Macs and iPads in India.

By 2025, however, Apple had begun studying whether the Indian manufacturing base could support more products. The obstacles were substantial because Macs and iPads have different supply chains and India's domestic market for those products is much smaller than its smartphone market.

Now the picture appears to be changing. Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said recently that Apple could expand manufacturing in India beyond iPhones and indicated that products such as iPads and Macs could be made here. The government has also committed Rs 62,500 crore over five years to a new Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme (MPMS) designed to increase manufacturing scale, local sourcing and domestic value addition.

However, it is important not to overstate this. Vaishnaw's comments are an indication of the direction of travel, not an Apple announcement specifying which MacBook or iPad will be made at which Indian factory and when. Still, the possibility is very much there.

Cook’s India legacy

What began in 2017 with Apple assembling the iPhone SE in India has become one of Tim Cook’s most consequential supply-chain bets. By 2025, Apple was assembling about 55 million iPhones in India, up from 36 million in 2024, meaning roughly one in four iPhones worldwide was being made there. Through December 2025, Apple’s Indian vendors had exported more than $50 billion of iPhones under the PLI programme, including nearly $16 billion in the first nine months of FY26 alone.

The manufacturing base has also become more Indian. Five iPhone factories, three operated by Tata and two by Foxconn, now anchor an ecosystem of nearly 45 companies, including component makers and smaller suppliers. Tata’s role is particularly significant. After acquiring Wistron’s Indian operation, the group has become a major Apple manufacturer rather than simply a local partner. Apple is also widening its supplier network, with Indian partners making components and sub-assemblies for its devices.

The most striking sign that India is moving beyond assembly is the reversal of the traditional supply chain. In FY26, Apple’s Indian vendors exported $2.5 billion of components and sub-assemblies to China, with the figure potentially reaching $3.5 billion for the full year. Such exports were only about $920 million in FY25 and negligible before that. The parts include PCB assemblies, housings and other components.

Local value addition remains the unfinished part of the story. Industry data reported by ET in July 2026 put domestic value addition across India’s smartphone manufacturing industry at 18-19%, roughly four times the level six years earlier. That points to the next stage of Cook’s India strategy of not merely making more iPhones but making more of the components that go into them.

With the government now pushing a Rs 62,500-crore manufacturing scheme, Apple could eventually extend this ecosystem to MacBooks and iPads, Vaishnaw has indicated.