Tata Electronics has overtaken Foxconn in the value of iPhones exported from India under the government’s production-linked incentive scheme. According to a Kotak Neo report of Business Standard data, Tata exported iPhones worth $26.3 billion over the five years of the scheme, from FY22 to FY26, against $25.6 billion for Foxconn. The data are from vendor submissions to the government.
The picture is different for total production. Tata’s total production value, which includes phones sold in India and abroad, was $35.5 billion over the period, which gives it a 46.01% share of the combined output of the two companies, while Foxconn’s was $38 billion. Foxconn therefore remains slightly ahead overall, because it produced more for the Indian market: its domestic production was $12.4 billion.
Exports are the larger part of the business. The report says exports made up 73.6% of the total value of iPhones assembled in the five years, and that domestic iPhone sales were $18.6 billion, or Rs 1,76,680 crore. Both figures are consistent with the idea that India has become an export base for Apple, though the report does not say which models or destinations were involved.
The history is different for the two firms. Foxconn began assembling iPhones in India in 2019, before the incentive scheme started, while Tata Electronics entered the business later. According to a search summary of Indian Web2, Tata became a participant in the Apple supply chain after acquiring 100% of the Taiwanese company Wistron’s Indian business in November 2023, and by 2026 it was Apple’s largest contract manufacturer in India with about 75,000 workers, up from about 15,000 two years earlier. The Kotak Neo report does not contain the employee figure, so it should be treated as unconfirmed.
What is the production-linked incentive scheme? It pays companies a share of the value of goods they make in India above a base level, over several years, to encourage manufacturing. The sources reviewed do not describe the rate or the total paid, so the amount of support behind the iPhone numbers is not known here.
The figures show how much the business has grown. Another search summary says that in 2025 the iPhone became India’s single largest export item, with about $13 billion of devices shipped from Indian factories, though that figure was not verified in a primary source. Over the five years from FY22 to FY26, the two firms exported nearly $52 billion of iPhones, which is IndiaX24’s sum of the two reported figures.
There are caveats about what the numbers mean. The value of an exported iPhone includes imported parts, so the value added in India is much less than the export value, and the sources do not give the figure. Tata overtaking Foxconn in exports also depends on the timing of production, and the lead is small, at $0.7 billion on $26 billion.
For India, the main point is the shift. A domestic company has become a leading maker of the world’s best-known phone, which shows that large-scale electronics manufacturing is possible, and it supports plans for components, such as the optical modules and chips covered in other IndiaX24 articles.
The rivalry between Tata and Foxconn is close, and the next set of figures will show whether Tata can also lead in total production.
Featured image: An iPhone (file photo, iPhone XS; a stand-in image, not a Tata-built phone). Photo by Cullen Steber, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.