Apple’s first physical retail store is located in the populous city of Mumbai.
Punit Paranjpe | Afp | Getty Images
For years, Tim Cook has been bullish on India. Now, he’s betting big on the South Asian giant as Apple shifts its focus away from China and expands its footprint in India.
Still, analysts told CNBC the iPhone-maker’s dependency on China will remain for years to come.
There’s potential for India to “become the next China” for Apple production, but it could take as long as a decade before it happens, said Martin Yang, senior analyst of emerging technologies at Oppenheimer & Co.
Apple is set to open its second India retail store in Delhi Thursday, two days after opening its first in Mumbai.
The Cupertino-based tech giant still has a strong presence in China due to its supply chain partners, and China’s infrastructure capabilities are still far better thanwhat India can offer, Nitin Soni, senior director at Fitch Ratings told CNBC.
“It will take Apple years to diversify away from China,” Soni said. “The country is still a very large pocket for Apple — not just in the assembly line, but the semiconductor ecosystem and testing as well.”
Apple’s efforts to move its assembly of products from China became more urgent in the last five years as U.S.-China trade tensions intensified, and supply chain disruptions caused by Beijing’s zero-Covid policy unraveled. The iPhone maker had to scale back production in China due to those restrictions, a move that hurt its bottom line.
The population growth and pure opportunity around India is the golden goose for Apple.
Dan Ives
Wedbush Securities
It is also highly unlikely that Apple will be able to completely eradicate its reliance on China, said Navkendar Singh, an associate vice president with International Data Corporation (IDC) India.
“Given the cost scales, logistics, and sheer inertia of some of the suppliers in the ecosystem in China, it’s very unlikely that Apple can completely remove itself from China,” Singh highlighted.
Nevertheless, Apple’s growth in India has only just begun and numerous opportunities await in both manufacturing production and retail sales in the country.
Apple’s ambitions for India
India is the second largest smartphone market worldwide for annual shipments and sales, accounting for almost 12% of the global market, according to data from IDC.
According to the market intelligence firm, Apple shipped 6.7 million iPhones in 2022 from India, a surge from 4.8 million devices in 2022. It stands at the sixth position after the U.S., China, Japan, U.K., and Germany for global iPhone shipments in 2022.
“The population growth and pure opportunity around India is the golden goose for Apple. It’s been a difficult market to ramp for Apple on the iPhone front over the years but now is clearly starting to find its stride,” Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities, said.
The technology giant currently manufactures 5% to 7% of its iPhones in India, a leap from just 1% in 2021 — and there’s no stopping there with further plans in the works to increase the company’s prominence in the country.
“China and the US along with Europe remain the hearts and lungs of the Apple story with India set to become a top 5 market focus for Apple. High hopes India can be a major incremental growth driver for Cupertino in the years ahead,” Ives told CNBC via email.
Although the Indian government said in January that Apple is aiming to make 25% of all of its iPhones in India, Ives said that’s a “lofty” goal and hitting 10% to 15% of production seems more realistic in the long term.
India will also continue to play second fiddle to Vietnam in the production of more sophisticated products such as the MacBooks, but smaller products such as Apple’s smart watches and AirPods being manufactured in India soon, Singh said.
There is such a concentration of the market in the urban centers, and Delhi and Mumbai “make up almost a quarter of the market for Apple [in India],” IDC’s Singh said, adding that more physical stores could open by the middle of 2024.
India’s rising middle class
IDC data showed Apple only has a 5% market share in India since low-to-mid-tier priced devices continue to be consumers’ top choices.
However, the country’s increasing adoption in technology and stronger spending power from consumers will generate higher iPhone sales, Fitch’s Soni said.
“We see that the middle class is becoming more affluent and moving towards the upper middle class, and there is an increasing trend of customers buying flagship smartphones,” Soni said. “This is also helped by the fact that 4G is now easily available all over India.”
But cheaper labor costs in India will not reduce the costs of Apple’s iPhones as customers would be willing to pay premium prices for Apple products, Singh said.
Apple will not reach the “price point of the mass market,” he said. “It remains a premium brand and they would love to keep that brand halo in place.”
Singh added that the company may instead offer schemes or bank tie-ups to make products more affordable.
— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.