Apple's IPhone Supply Chain In India Creates 350,000 Jobs

Illustration of Apple employees in India (photo: x @tim_cook)

JAKARTA - Apple's iPhone supply chain in India has grown rapidly, creating a workforce of 350,000 people in just five years to produce iPhones.

China's iPhone supply chain is known to be huge, with hundreds of thousands of people joining each year. However, although it took decades to build, Apple managed to develop a significant supply chain in India in a much shorter time.

Now, in the fifth year of production in India, Apple has scaled up local supply chains to a high level. According to government officials speaking to the Economic Times, Apple has been in a relationship with nearly 45 companies in India.

Relations with component suppliers have a profound impact on local employment figures. About 350,000 jobs have been created through connections with suppliers in India, where officials state that about 120,000 of them are direct jobs.

Wider Impacts In India

Apple's impact in India is actually even wider. This figure does not include thousands of jobs in five iPhone factories operating in the region.

List of companies involved in Apple's supply chain in India includes large and small companies. According to an official, there are 20 Indian micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in this supply chain. They join large companies such as Tata Electronics, Avary, and Titan Engineering and Automation.

Some of them will also apply for a modified Incentive Related Production (PLI) scheme, which will expand the program to component manufacturers.

The PLI scheme, which began in 2020, helped Apple advance manufacturing in India by offering incentives to increase production scale in the region. Five years later, an official stated that about one in five iPhones produced in the world were made in India.

Although Apple initially involved several Chinese companies to build Indian supply chains, there were some obstacles. Clashes between the Indian and Chinese troops in 2020 pushed for a shift to the use of more non-Chinese companies, although China is trying to maintain its position as Apple's main production base.

Production Redistribution

Apple's shift to India is part of efforts to protect its production from global events. In 2020, this can be seen from the impact of COVID-19 on factories in China, as well as the rules applied to combat the pandemic. Financial threats are also a problem, with geopolitical issues such as repeated trade wars between the US and China as well as the current situation of US import rates that pose uncertainty in the ecosystem.

India is a kind of insurance policy. If production in China is disrupted or sending Chinese production iPhones to certain markets is problematic, operations in India could take over and address the issue.