India just had its best quarter ever for phone exports
Nearly $10 billion worth of smartphones left India between April and June, while phone sales around the world were shrinking.
By Duangduean Studios
Turn a new phone over and read the tiny print on the back of the box. More and more often, it says "Assembled in India", and not only on phones sold here.
Between April and June this year, India exported smartphones worth $9.84 billion. That's the biggest quarter so far, and about 23% more than the $7.97 billion in the same months of 2025. Phones made up close to two-thirds of the country's entire electronics exports for the quarter.
The timing is what caught our eye. Analysts quoted in the reports say global smartphone shipments fell by around 13% over those same three months. So the world was buying fewer phones, and more of the ones it did buy were coming from Indian factories.
Most of this is down to Apple moving a large chunk of iPhone assembly here, and the US is by far the biggest customer, taking roughly 71% of the export value in April and May. The government's production-linked incentive scheme helped get those lines built in the first place. Its run for Apple ended in March, after pulling in more than ₹20,600 crore of investment and supporting exports of over ₹6.53 lakh crore. In calendar 2025, smartphones became India's single largest export, with more than $30 billion shipped, and industry people expect something like $35 billion this financial year.
It's easy to be cynical about assembly ("they're just putting parts together") but that's how most manufacturing countries got started. A factory that assembles phones needs people who can test, package, repair, ship and manage quality at a very high standard. Those people move jobs, start suppliers, train others. Ten years from now the more interesting story might be the companies that grew up around these plants, not the plants themselves.
We make games for Android, so we have a slightly selfish reason to like this one. A growing share of the phones people play our games on were built in India. Not long ago that would have sounded far-fetched.
Further reading: India records its highest-ever quarterly smartphone exports (Swarajya, citing Business Standard) · Smartphones drive record electronics exports (Outlook Business)