After largely ignoring the country for many years, why is Apple currently bullish on India? What does it have up its sleeve?

Apple and India have had for the longest time a singularly peculiar relationship.

The company’s founder Steve Jobs had a famous connection with the country, taking a trip to the Himalayas in search of spirituality, even though he did publicly state that after visiting India he realised that “maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Kairolie Baba [a Hindu guru]”.

India’s consumers have historically loved Apple – perhaps not as much as the Chinese – but certainly as much as our wallets have allowed us to.  

Apple the company, though, hasn’t always loved India back: Jobs shut the company’s only India office, a software development and support centre in Bangalore, in 2006, just two months after it opened with much fanfare; reports at the time suggested that the mercurial CEO found the quality of the company’s Indian operations lacking.

The iPhone-and-Macintosh-maker has also never taken the Indian market very seriously, with current CEO Tim Cook saying in 2012 that “he loves India but the multi-layer retail distribution structure present in the country” (brought on by the Indian government’s strict regulation surrounding FDI in single-brand retail) meant that in the intermediate-term there are larger opportunities outside India.

Apple

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