Despite commitments to India, Apple is losing marketshare due to high cost of phones, and core services, like Maps and Siri, not working well locally
Manish Singh / CNBC :
Context & Ripple Effects
This January 2018 report was the early warning in a five-year arc of Apple struggling in India: months later, Counterpoint counted fewer than 1M iPhones sold in India in the first half of 2018, with three key Apple India sales executives departing, and by year-end [[a:936771|reported marketshare had shrunk to roughly 1% with revenue under half of what was once hoped]].
Apple's responses since — India-specific features like smart downloads and Indian Siri voices unveiled in 2020 and broader initiatives by 2023 — have not closed the gap, because the two problems named here persist: prices remain unpalatable for the market, and services like Apple Pay are still unavailable to Indian customers.
First-order effects
- Apple's India sales leadership was already hollowing out at the time of reporting, and the unit numbers that followed confirmed the commercial damage: sub-1M half-year sales against a ~1% share of the world's fastest-growing smartphone market.
- Indian buyers face a double exclusion — flagship pricing they largely cannot justify, plus core bundled services (Maps, Siri, Apple Pay) that underperform or simply do not exist locally, weakening the ecosystem case for choosing iPhone over cheaper rivals.
Second-order effects
- Apple was forced into market-specific product work — the 2020 smart-downloads feature and localized Siri voices exist precisely because defaults tuned for Western markets failed in India — a costly retrofit that rivals designing for the market natively never need.
- With hardware share capped, Apple leaned on supply-side commitment instead: by 2023 the expansion was slowed by logistics, tariffs, infrastructure and a lack of urgency among suppliers and officials, and by 2026 Apple told suppliers it would merely maintain — not grow — its India production share after local sites struggled without China-based teams.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to a structural ceiling: a premium-hardware-plus-services model does not transplant into a price-sensitive market through manufacturing presence alone — eight years of commitments produced factories but not customers, suggesting share requires native pricing and native services, not relocated assembly lines.
- If the 2026 production plateau holds, India functions for Apple primarily as a manufacturing diversification hedge away from China rather than a demand market — decoupling where Apple builds from where Apple sells.
The trend: Apple's India experience is a decade-long case study in premium ecosystems failing to localize: manufacturing footprints expand while consumer marketshare stays marginal because price and service localization lag the factory buildout.