Apple CEO Tim Cook will officially hand over the baton to head of hardware engineering John Ternus on September 1, the transition coming at a time when the company’s market capitalisation stands at around $4 trillion, with India making up a chunk of it.
Cook had spent years cultivating India, whose importance at quarterly earning calls has grown year on year, along with the number of Apple stores in the country — six at the moment.
It is now up to Ternus to carry this momentum forward.
Ternus inherits an India that is at once a manufacturing base, a creative frontier and one of Apple’s most consequential markets.
Cook spotted India’s potential early. In May 2016, he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss the possibility of manufacturing and retailing in the country. Months later, Apple opened an App Accelerator in Bengaluru — a clear signal that Cook viewed India not merely as a consumer market, but as a reservoir of talent.
Cook’s visit came at a delicate moment. Xiaomi and other Chinese players were making aggressive inroads, filling shops with inexpensive handsets, while iPhones remained aspirational. Rather than responding with a cheaper iPhone, Apple took a longer view: deepening its app developer ecosystem, building out its services business and, crucially, investing in local manufacturing.
Apple began manufacturing iPhones in India in 2017. Since then, the company has worked with suppliers to assemble iPhone models and produce a growing number of components.
That manufacturing bet has since transformed Apple’s global supply chain. Even a few years ago, nearly every iPhone was assembled in China. Today, that picture looks very different. Last year, Cook confirmed during an earnings call that the “majority” of iPhones sold in the US were being manufactured in India, while the “vast majority of other products — the Mac, the iPad and the Watch” — came from Vietnam.
The seeds of that shift were sown during the pandemic, when lockdowns paralysed Chinese factories and exposed the downside of depending on a single country for so much of the world’s technology production. Then came US President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with China, which clocked a record trade surplus of nearly $1.2 trillion in 2025. India, with its improving infrastructure, government incentives and growing supplier ecosystem, was the natural beneficiary.
Yet, Trump’s endorsement proved conditional. “I told Tim Cook: ‘We’re not interested in you building in India. They can take care of themselves; you up your production,’” he said in May last year, encouraging production on American soil. Cook navigated the friction with characteristic diplomacy.
On the sales front, the results have been equally striking. Apple now commands a lion’s share of the super-premium smartphone segment in India (a category that every smartphone maker now wants a bite of), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
“During Tim Cook’s tenure, the iPhone has expanded its market share to over 9 per cent in the Indian smartphone market as of 2025. At a time when several developed markets are nearing saturation, India has emerged as a critical growth driver for Apple. The combination of rising premiumisation, increasing disposable income, and a growing aspirational consumer base has supported this expansion,” said Abhilash Kumar, lead research adviser (director), Smart Analytics Global (SAG).
To sustain that momentum, Apple is now casting its net wider. The iPhone 17e targets first-time buyers who have long admired the brand from a distance. The MacBook Neo — a global bestseller — has found a particularly receptive audience in India, topping priority lists for parents equipping students ahead of the college season. Together, they speak to a generation that does not just consume content but creates it.
“We provide people with tools. These tools help them create amazing films. And one of the tools we provide is the iPhone. You can see that it has gone from democratising photography to now democratising filmmaking,” Cook told The Telegraph in April 2023.
Of India’s creative community, he said: “They make my heart sing. It wasn’t too many years ago when you would kind of (get) pushed into a career path of an engineer, or a doctor may be. And now it’s so great that there’s a creative community that’s blossoming out there. It’s quite alive in India.”
Kumar said Apple’s journey in India reflected a clear transition — from market entry to strategic integration.
“India is no longer just a growth market for iPhones; it is becoming a cornerstone of Apple’s global manufacturing and export strategy,” he added.