India-made iPhone shipments may grow 20% globally by 2024: Analyst

The India-made iPhone shipments will grow to 20 to 25 per cent globally by 2024, depending on market conditions, a leading analyst has said.

According to Ming-Chi Kuo of TF International Securities, the made-in-India iPhones are projected to account for 12 to 14 per cent of Apple’s global iPhone shipments this year.

In a Medium blogpost, he further predicted that the importance of the South Asian market to Apple will notably rise in the coming year.

Taiwanese giant Foxconn currently owns between 75 per cent and 80 per cent of India’s iPhone production capacity, said Kuo.

This dynamic is expected to shift as Tata Group begins manufacturing iPhones at the Wistron production line it acquired in India.

“By making India’s Tata an iPhone assembler (already acquired Wistron’s iPhone production lines in India), Apple can strengthen its relationship with the Indian government. This move will benefit future sales of iPhones and other products in India and is critical to Apple’s growth over the next decade,” he said.

Kuo also anticipated that Apple would begin introductory manufacturing for the regular iPhone 17, which is scheduled to appear in the second half of 2025, in India in the second half of next year.

According to him, this will be Apple’s first foray into developing a new iPhone model outside of China.

The standard iPhone is chosen for its lower-difficulty design development to reduce design risk, the analyst said.

Moreover, Kuo estimated that Foxconn’s production capacity in Zhengzhou and Taiyuan, China, will fall by 35 per cent to 45 per cent and 75 per cent to 85 per cent, respectively, by 2024.

“In addition to expanding production in India, Luxshare’s rapid increase in iPhone order allocation and improvements in production line automation are also the main reasons for the production scale reduction,” he wrote.