Workers assemble smartphones at Dixon Technologies’ Padget Electronics Pvt factory in Uttar Pradesh, India, on Jan. 28, 2021.
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India has overtaken China to become the top exporter of smartphones to the U.S., according to research firm Canalys, reflecting the shift in manufacturing supply chain away from Beijing amid tariff-fueled uncertainty.
Smartphones assembled in India accounted for 44% of U.S. imports of those devices in the second quarter, a significant increase from just 13% in the same period last year. Total volume of smartphones made in India soared 240% from a year earlier, Canalys said.
In contrast, the share of Chinese smartphone exports to the U.S. shrank to 25% in the quarter ended June, from 61% a year earlier, Canalys data released Monday showed. Vietnam’s share of smartphone exports to the U.S. was also higher than that of China at 30%.
The surge in shipments from India was primarily driven by Apple‘s accelerated shift toward the country at a time of heightened trade uncertainty between the U.S. and China, said Sanyam Chaurasia, principal analyst at Canalys. This is the first time India exported more smartphones to the U.S. than China.
Apple has reportedly been speeding up its plans to make most of its iPhones sold in the U.S. at factories in India this year, with the aim of manufacturing around a quarter of all iPhones in the country in the next few years.
Trump has threatened Apple with additional tariffs and urged the company’s CEO Tim Cook to make iPhones domestically, a move experts have said would be nearly impossible as it would push iPhone prices higher.
While many of Apple’s core products, including iPhones and Mac laptops, have received exemptions from Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs,” officials have warned that it could be a temporary reprieve.
Its global peers, Samsung Electronic and Motorola, have also been striving to move assembly for U.S.-bound smartphones to India, though their shift has been significantly slower and is limited in scale compared with Apple, according to Canalys.
Last-mile assembly
Many global manufacturers have been increasingly shifting their final assembly to India, allocating more capacity in the South-Asian nation to serve the U.S. market, said Renauld Anjoran, executive vice president of Agilian Technology, an electronics manufacturer in China.
The Guangdong-based company is now renovating a facility in India with plans to move part of its production to the country. “The plan for India is moving ahead as fast as we can,” Anjoran said. The company expects to begin trial production runs soon before ramping up to full-scale manufacturing.
That said, yield rates — an indicator of manufacturing efficiency — are lower when manufacturing in India and Vietnam, compared with China, Anjoran said.
While shipments, which represent the number of devices sent to retailers do not reflect final sales, they are a proxy for market demand.
Overall, iPhone shipments to the U.S. declined by 11% year on year to 13.3 million units in the second quarter, reversing the 25.7% growth in the prior quarter, according to Canalys. Globally, iPhone shipments declined 2% from a year earlier to 44.8 million units in the April to June quarter, according to Canalys.
Shares of Apple have tumbled 14% this year, partly on concerns over its high exposure to tariff uncertainty and intensifying competition in smartphones and artificial intelligence sector.
While the company has begun assembling iPhone 16 Pro models in India, it still relies heavily on China’s more mature manufacturing infrastructure to meet U.S. demand for the premium model, Canalys said.
In April, Trump imposed a 26% tariff on imports from India, much lower than the triple-digit tariffs on China at the time, before pausing those duties until an Aug 1. deadline.
— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this story.