Apple Dominates India's Smartphone Exports, Driving Growth in Electronics Sector

Five years of the government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme have certainly transformed the country into a major smartphone export base, but almost 87% of the increase in smartphone exports during the period has come from Apple. Smartphone exports surged from $5.5 billion in FY22 to $29.36 billion in FY26, but the non-Apple portion rose only 74%, from about $4.2 billion to $7.4 billion. Apple’s iPhone exports, in contrast, jumped nearly 17-fold from about $1.25 billion to around $22 billion, making the company the overwhelming driver of the export surge. That Apple -led expansion has, in turn, transformed the broader electronics export basket, although at a different pace. Electronics exports rose from $23.55 billion in FY23 to $29.12 billion in FY24 and $38.6 billion in FY25, before reaching about $48 billion in FY26, more than doubling in three years. Smartphones have accounted for an increasingly large share of this basket, rising from about 47% of electronics exports in FY23 to 61% in FY26. The contrast is significant: while Apple has driven a spectacular expansion in one product category, the wider electronics ecosystem has been growing at a slower, more incremental pace. The scale of Apple’s rise becomes clearer when the five-year PLI period is viewed as a whole. India added nearly $24 billion to its annual smartphone exports between FY22 and FY26. Apple alone added about $20.75 billion, while all other manufacturers together contributed roughly $3.1 billion. As a result, Apple’s share of smartphone exports has risen sharply during the period, from about 23% in FY22 to more than 75% in FY26. The shift reflects the rapid expansion of Apple’s contract manufacturing base in India and the country’s growing role as an export hub for iPhones. The wider electronics industry, meanwhile, has been building out around that growth. Telecom equipment, electronic components, printed circuit boards, chargers, photovoltaic cells and other products have contributed to the expansion of the export basket. But the pace has been markedly different from smartphones. While the value of electronics exports more than doubled between FY23 and FY26, the smartphone segment alone increased more than five-fold between FY22 and FY26. The result is that the headline growth in electronics exports increasingly reflects the rise of mobile phones, even as a broader manufacturing ecosystem begins to take shape. The Apple effect has become even more pronounced after the PLI scheme ended in March. In the first five months of FY27, smartphone exports rose 36% year-on-year to $15.96 billion, while Apple’s exports jumped 47% to $13.2 billion. Apple therefore accounted for about 82% of smartphone exports during April-August, leaving roughly $2.8 billion for all other manufacturers. More strikingly, 98% of the incremental increase in smartphone exports during the period came from Apple. Electronics exports rose 34% to $26.66 billion in the same period, with Apple’s iPhone shipments accounting for about half of the total. The numbers point to two different outcomes from the electronics push. The PLI scheme has clearly created scale in mobile-phone manufacturing, attracted global companies and established smartphones as a major export engine. But the extraordinary increase in smartphone exports has been concentrated overwhelmingly in one company, while the expansion of the wider electronics base has been more gradual. For turning the manufacturing scale into a deeper export ecosystem, the next phase will have to move beyond final assembly and into components and sub-assemblies. The government has already begun that shift with the Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme (MPMS), introduced after the PLI programme, with a greater focus on strengthening the domestic value chain. Alongside it, the Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme (ECMS) is aimed at building capacity in displays, camera modules, printed circuit boards, passive components and other critical parts.