Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to visit India next week to open the first two Apple stores in the country, Bloomberg reported today (April 11). It will be Cook’s first trip to India in seven years and comes as the country becomes increasingly important to Apple as it shifts its supply chain focus away from China.
Apple announced today it will open a store in Mumbai on April 18 and another in New Delhi on April 20. Cook is likely to attend the openings of both locations, and in between the two store openings Apple has arranged for Cook to meet with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sources told Bloomberg.
Apple has had an Indian online shop since 2020. But the two physical stores have been a long time in the making because of a local law forbidding foreign companies from opening retail stores unless they source a significant portion of the goods from within India.
Cook last visited India in 2016 and launched a design and development center in Bengaluru.
Since last year, Apple has been moving some of its iPhone production to India from China to take advantage of the country’s generous government subsidies to electronics manufacturing, lower labor costs and more predictable political climate. In the past 12 months, India might have doubled its iPhone export to $2.5 billion, pending official data. For now, the country makes less than 5 percent of iPhones sold worldwide, but Apple’s long-term goal is to assemble up to 45 percent of iPhones in India, analysts estimate.
India is the world’s second largest smartphone market behind China, but a tough one for selling high-end gadgets. Most smartphones sold in India are priced below $150. Apple’s iPhone, which starts at $799 in the U.S., is out of reach for most Indian consumers, whose average monthly household income is less than $300. But thanks to the country’s rapid economic growth, sales of iPhones in India are growing more than 30 percent every year, according to Counterpoint, a market research firm.
Both new Apple stores are located inside upscale malls in Mumbai and New Delhi, targeting the two cities’ affluent shoppers.
On Apple’s most recent earnings call in February, Cook stressed India’s importance as both a production base and a market. “India is a hugely exciting market for us and a major focus. I’m very bullish on India,” the Apple CEO said during the call, adding that Apple just hit a revenue record in India for the three months ended December and sales grew “very strong double digits year over year.”
