“If you look at Apple’s manufacturing strategy for iPhones, it has mostly been countries where they get benefits on manufacturing: geographical advantage, government incentives and costs, and where they have good domestic demand,” says Neil Shah, a Mumbai-based analyst and co-founder of Counterpoint Research.

India not only offers government support and lower costs than China, it also has English-speaking software engineers and a big pool of consumers, he says. “India is the second-largest smartphone market in the world, and it could potentially be the largest.”