Local tax incentives plus Apple's moves to reduce the impact of US tariffs mean India's growing iPhone production has crossed a milestone.

By April 2025, India was making one in five of all iPhones worldwide. Following the US tariffs that began being imposed then, Apple redirected 97% of all Indian-made iPhones to the States.

According to India's Economic Times, total production has now exceeded $50 billion worth of iPhones. The figure is based specifically on the exports made since Apple enrolled in India's Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) program in 2021.

PLI is a five-year program based on India's financial years, which run April 1 to March 31. So Apple began benefiting from it in India's financial year 2022.

India is currently in its financial year 2026, which ends on March 31, 2026. So the final figures for exports under PLI are yet to be known.

However, an unnamed official said that "in the first nine months of [Financial Year 2026] alone, Apple has already exported nearly $16 billion, taking the cumulative iPhone exports past $50 billion within the PLI period."

Samsung has also benefited from the PLI program. In the same financial years 2021 to 2025, Samsung exported almost $17 billion worth of smartphones from India.

Apple has been manufacturing iPhones in India since around 2017, but until recently, they were for sale within the country. There may have been exports, but the purpose was to fulfil India's legal requirements regarding local manufacturing.

Commenting on the Economic Times report, Indian Minister for Railways, Information & Broadcasting, Electronics & Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnav, tweeted that $50 billion was a "major milestone." Crediting the government's "Make in India" program, he said that "electronics production has increased 6 times in the last 11 years."

There have been other incentives for Apple to ramp up its iPhone manufacturing in India, despite Trump telling Apple to stop expanding there. At various points, Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs have hit India, but they are still less than Apple is being forced to pay for Chinese imports.

Nonetheless, Apple has been steadily increasing Indian production. In 2025, because of the tariffs, Apple doubled how many iPhones it imports to the US from India.