In a historic pivot that stresses the tectonic shifts in global electronics manufacturing, India has overtaken China as the top source of smartphones sold in the United States. According to Canalys, in the second quarter of 2025, India accounted for a staggering 44 per cent of US-bound smartphone shipments, surpassing China, whose share fell to just 25 per cent, down from over 60 per cent a year earlier. Vietnam, where Samsung Electronics Co. has concentrated much of its manufacturing muscle, ranked second.
Image for representational purposes only
The shift, while driven by the mobility strategies of Apple Inc. and its supply chain, carries far-reaching consequences for materials markets — aluminium foremost among them.
The acceleration of Indian electronics exports is the downstream result of strategic risk diversification. As US-China trade tensions fester and tariffs loom large, Apple and its peers are rewiring their supply chains at speed. While China remains the assembly line of the world in absolute terms, its relative dominance is eroding in key high-value segments. Apple’s iPhones, still predominantly made in China, are now increasingly assembled in India, a change that is being reflected in shipping patterns and origin data.
According to Canalys, India’s shipments to the US more than tripled in the past year, signalling not a seasonal spike but the early stages of a systemic relocation. Much of the credit, and arguably the catalyst, goes to Apple.
Although its US iPhone shipments declined by 11 per cent in Q2, largely due to aggressive stockpiling in Q1, the company has been frontloading inventories amid mounting tariff risks and geopolitical volatility. That frontloading, Canalys suggests, helped inflate India’s Q2 numbers. But the infrastructure to sustain this output is already in place.
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