Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed that the Cupertino-based tech giant will be opening news stores in India later this year. While Cook did not reveal the cities where these new stores will open, the company had already confirmed in an earlier blog post that the four new stores will be located in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune and Noida.
“In retail, in addition to the two stores we opened during the quarter, we’re also looking forward to a new retail store in the UAE, the arrival of the online store in Saudi Arabia and new retail stores in India later this year,” Cook said during the Apple earnings call.
Apple stores in India:
Apple currently operates two retail stores in India, one in Mumbai’s BKC and another in Delhi’s Saket. Both opened to much fanfare in 2023, with Tim Cook in attendance and crowds lining up to get their hands on the latest Apple products.
These new stores are part of Apple’s broader push in India as the company seeks to balance its reliance on the Chinese market. Last year, Apple began manufacturing the iPhone 15 series in India, and this year, it announced that the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max are also being manufactured domestically, with plans to export them to select countries worldwide.
Meanwhile, Cook also emphasised during the recent earnings call that most US-bound iPhones during the June quarter will be manufactured in India.
“For the June quarter, we do expect the majority of iPhones sold in the US will have India as their country of origin,” Cook added.
As per a recent Bloomberg report, Apple is planning to double iPhone production in India to 80 million units to meet the demand of 60 million iPhones to be sold in the US by 2026.
Soon after President Trump's reciprocal tariff announcement, Apple had lost around $700 billion in market value. Since then, the US government has exempted electronics items like smartphones from the tariffs, which came as good news for the tech giant, but a separate 20% tariff is still in place on China which makes manufacturing iPhones in the country costlier.
