When Apple set its sights on India as its next promising market, CEO Tim Cook planned to take a leaf out of the company’s China playbook – a retail and manufacturing strategy that had paid hefty dividends to the US tech giant.
“We are, in essence, taking what we learned in China years ago and how we scale to China and bringing that to bear,” Cook told investors in February 2023. The company had just seen record quarterly sales in the Indian market, and was just weeks ahead of the opening of Apple’s first stores in the country. “India is a hugely exciting market for us.”
At the time, Cook’s optimism in India also carried a degree of pragmatism. To navigate the rising trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies and avoid US tariffs on China-made goods – both the duties already in place and those likely to be imposed in the future – Apple had bet on India to become its next manufacturing hub.
India began to deliver. In 2022, the country produced around 6 per cent of all iPhones, but by 2026, that figure was expected to surpass 25 per cent, according to data from Counterpoint Research.
However, this year Cook’s vision faced a sobering reality check. In June, a massive cyberattack by hacking group World Leaks hit Tata Electronics, Apple’s Bengaluru-based partner for iPhone parts and assembly, leaking more than 200,000 files on the dark web. Analysts called the leak the biggest in the company’s history.
“India has proven it can scale production; now it must prove it can scale trust,” said Christopher Tang, a professor specialising in global supply chain management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
While India managed to ramp up labour-intensive assembly, attract major suppliers such as Foxconn and Tata, and leveraged government incentives, the incident revealed that the ecosystem still needed to catch up in three vital areas: information governance, supplier discipline, and cyber-operational integration, Tang noted.