US President Donald Trump has asked iPhone maker Apple Inc to dial down its India expansion plan, which involves manufacturing in India and selling to Americans, and focus on creating capacity in the US instead.

Speaking in Doha on Thursday, Trump said: “I had a little problem with Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) yesterday. I said to him, ‘My friend, I have treated you very good. You are coming up with $500 billion, but now I hear you are building all over India. I don’t want you building in India’.”

Soon after Trump’s comment cast a shadow on the Modi government’s avowed agenda to make India a major producer of smartphones, officials in Delhi insisted that Apple’s investment plans remained intact. “Apple has said that its investment plans in India are intact and it proposes to continue to have India as a major manufacturing base for its products,” PTI reported quoting sources.

Trump clarified that Apple could make products in India for the Indian market.

“You can build in India, if you want to take care of India,” he said.

But the clear message was that his administration would be miffed if the world’s second-largest company by market capitalisation followed in India the model it had adopted in China.

“We put up with all the plants that you built in China for years. Now you got to build (with) us. We’re not interested in building in India. India can take care of themselves,” Trump said.

Earlier this year, Apple had shipped five planeloads of iPhones out of India after Trump signalled an intent to impose harsh “reciprocal” tariffs on 60 countries including India. That scare blew over with the announcement of a moratorium, but Trump’s latest comments constitute a fresh challenge for Apple’s plans for India.

Trump’s comments came two weeks after Cook had told investors and analysts, after the quarterly results, that most of the iPhones to be sold in the US in the coming months would be made in India. Cook did not quantify any number.

When the Apple CEO made that observation, however, China and the US were at loggerheads -- each slapping a punitive tariff on the other and virtually blotting out bilateral trade.

Since then, the two countries have decided to pause the high tariff regimes following a high-level talk in Geneva. What Apple will do in the changed circumstances is unclear.

China enjoys a clear competitive advantage over others with its manufacturing prowess backed by an abundance of skilled manpower, supportive policies, and world-class infrastructure.

However, even before the US-China trade tensions became a major headache for many global corporations that source from China, trade and business observers had noticed a move among companies to reduce their reliance on China.

With the complex supply chains for manufactured products breaking down during the Covid pandemic, many companies, including Apple, had decided to diversify their base. India became a beneficiary of that “China plus one” strategy.

Government officials said India’s competitive advantage would be obvious to Apple. According to one estimate, 15 per cent of iPhone’s global output comes from India.

The Apple ecosystem in India is one the biggest job creators in the country. It is estimated to have employed around 2 lakh people across various vendors in India.

However, Apple itself does not manufacture iPhones in India. It does so through companies like the Taiwanese chip maker Foxconn and Tata Electronics and Pegatron (now majority-owned by Tata Electronics).

According to an analysis by S&P Global, iPhone sales in the US reached 75.9 million units in 2024, with exports in March from India at 3.1 million units.

“Apple’s Indian exports already headed predominantly to the United States, which represented 81.9 per cent of phones exported by the firm in the three months to February 28, 2025,” the S&P Global Market Intelligence report said.

“That increased to 97.6 per cent in March 2025 as a result of a 219 per cent jump in exports, likely reflecting the firm looking to pre-empt higher tariffs.”

Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced in April that iPhones worth ₹1.5 lakh crore were exported from India in financial year 2024-25.