Three times per day, the gates to this factory open to swallow buses ferrying thousands of workers—around three-quarters of them women. These workers spend eight hours per day, six days per week, on a humming assembly line, soldering components, turning screws, or operating machinery. The factory is one of the biggest iPhone plants in India, with some 17,000 employees who churn out 6 million iPhones every year. And it’s fast expanding.
Most of the 232 million iPhones Apple sold in 2022 came from factories in China, with many of them originating from a single massive Foxconn facility in Zhengzhou. But shifting geopolitical tides have recently forced Apple to re-evaluate its exposure to China. First came the pandemic, when Beijing’s harsh lockdowns badly disrupted global supply chains. Now U.S. intelligence assessments, made public this year, say that Chinese President Xi Jinping has instructed his military to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027… A hot war with China could have disastrous consequences, not only for the world, but also for Apple’s ability to manufacture many of the products behind its $2.7 trillion business.
Powering Apple’s pivot to India is Foxconn. By 2024, Foxconn hopes to nearly quadruple its production at this South Indian factory to 20 million iPhones per year, and reportedly plans to hire tens of thousands more workers to make that possible. Satellite images provided to TIME by Planet Labs show rapid expansion at the complex, with three new factory buildings constructed over the past two years and newly broken ground on space large enough to accommodate at least three more. Apple could manufacture 25% of all iPhones in India by 2025, up from just 5% in 2022, according to a JPMorgan analysis.