Sriperumbudur

About a quarter of the world's iPhones are now assembled in India.

Foxconn's plant at Sri Perumbudur outside Chennai runs around the clock.

Phones have become India's largest single export item by value, and since two thousand and twenty-one, something like seventy billion dollars of them have been built there.

On paper, that's precisely the industrial breakthrough promised in twenty-fourteen.

Domestic value added in India electronics runs between fifteen and twenty percent.

In China, it's around forty.

The woman on that line at Sri Perumbudur has a real wage and a real job, and I won't pretend otherwise.

She also has a job that exists because it was cheaper to do than the final step here, and final steps move.