Apple is continuing to extricate itself from manufacturing in China and instead is expanding its efforts to manufacture its latest generation of iPhone batteries in India in a bid to diversify its global supply chain.
According to sources familiar with the situation, the tech giant has notified component suppliers to begin sourcing batteries for the incoming iPhone 16 from Indian factories.
“If all goes well with iPhone 16 battery supply, Apple plans to move more iPhone battery production to India,” said one of the sources.
Additionally, some Chinese suppliers, such as Desay of China, have been encouraged to set up component procedures and local joint venture partners, and are allowed to do so with the approval of the Indian government.
Others, like Simplo Technology, a Taiwanese battery supplier, are to expand on their production in India for orders in the coming years.
Desay, Simplo and their competitors, package the electric cells produced by TDK and their counterparts into modules to offer them to assemblers like Foxconn.
A Japanese supplier to Apple, TDK, is building a 180-acre plant in Manesar, Haryana, India, where it will make battery cells for iPhones, an Indian minister revealed this week.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the minister of state for electronics and IT, praised Apple, TDK and local authorities for supporting the government’s “objective of strengthening [the] electronics manufacturing ecosystem in India” in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
According to TDK, the company “has begun construction of a plant in India for part of the battery production.”
This has been a long time coming for Apple, which has been attempting to extract itself from China. The escalating trade tensions between Washington and Beijing have only served to speed up the process for the tech giant.
Apple is also looking to other countries to begin diversifying its supply chain, such as Vietnam and India, but it has been a challenge to get the new plants to be up to the tech titan’s standards in terms of scale, speed and quality.
India’s Narendra Modi government has been campaigning to become a global manufacturer in mobile phones, batteries and others with the slogan, “Make in India”, which has sought to partner with companies by offering incentives.
Already, Apple has manufactured batteries in India with the iPhone 15 line at plants overseen by Taiwanese contract manufacturers such as Foxconn, Apple’s biggest supplier, who plans to invest roughly $1.5 billion for a new production facility in India.
