Bloomberg reported on 26 October that India now assembles roughly one in every four iPhones made globally, and questioned whether the expansion is worth its cost. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Andy Mukherjee argues that Indian iPhone assembly relies heavily on imported components and on taxpayer subsidies that may not be justified by the manufacturing gains.
Mukherjee’s argument is that reproducing China’s manufacturing success in India requires increasingly costly public support, and the resulting assembly work may provide less economic value than headline figures suggest. The report frames the growth in Indian iPhone production as significant, but asks whether the subsidies needed to sustain it are a sound use of public money.
Several details are missing from Bloomberg’s account. It does not state the value of the subsidies involved, the specific components India still imports, or whether the one-in-four figure is measured by units, value or a particular model year. It is also unclear whether the analysis compares the full ecosystem costs of manufacturing in India and China. Without those details, the wider economic benefit of India’s iPhone assembly growth is hard to assess.