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When Tim Cook steps down as Apple’s CEO — handing the reins to hardware engineering chief John Ternus after nearly 15 years — it’s worth pausing on what made his run so remarkable. Not just the numbers, extraordinary as they are — more than $100 billion in annual profit and a $3+ trillion valuation — but something rarer in corporate life: he did what he said he would do.
In 2016, The Indian Express sat down with Cook at a time when Apple in India was at best a punchline. Market share was negligible. Its phones were too expensive. The competition — cheap Chinese phones — seemed perfectly suited to a price-sensitive market that Apple appeared completely wrong for. Analysts said so. The numbers said so.
But Cook didn’t seem to care. In hindsight, it reads like a blueprint.
In 2023-24, Apple’s revenue in India crossed nearly $8 billion. The brand that had no business being in this market, by the conventional logic of 2016, is now one of the company’s most important global growth stories. And if you go back and read that interview carefully, almost none of it is a surprise.
‘We are about making the best products’
The most persistent pressure on Apple in India has always been the same: make a cheaper phone. A “budget iPhone.” Something under $200 for a billion-person market where most people spend a fraction of what an iPhone costs.
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Cook’s answer, then and always, was a flat no, but he framed it with unusual clarity.
“We are about making the best products, and we are not going to lower the bar and say we will reduce our standards to make another product. That is not who we are, and that is not something our customers expect from us.”
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What followed was creativity. Instead of a cheap new phone, Apple sold older models: the iPhone 11 and the SE. They made no-cost EMIs standard. They brought financing to a market that didn’t expect it from a premium brand. They partnered with carriers and banks. They made the aspiration reachable without touching the product itself.
Today, Apple owns over 60% of the super-premium smartphone segment in India in 2025, according to IDC. Xiaomi and the BBK stable — Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus — dominate the volumes. Apple took the value.
‘The developer community here is already large and growing fast’
Cook also understood early that hardware alone couldn’t win India. The iPhone needed an Indian soul — apps, services, experiences built for how people here actually lived and worked.
“We look at it (India) as an unbelievable source of talent for both our internal operations like R&D on maps… but also as a developer population with a lot of entrepreneurs who want to develop and create apps they want to offer to the world,” he said.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook interacts with attendees and media during an Apple retail event, reflecting the company’s long-term push to deepen its presence in India through direct engagement and premium in-store experiences. (Express Image)
This wasn’t flattery. A few months later, in March 2017, Apple opened an App Design and Development Accelerator in Bengaluru, its first in Asia. It was a signal that India wasn’t just a sales market. It was a talent market. A creation market.
Today, the iOS app economy in India supports over a million jobs. Indian developers are building apps that serve not just local users but global ones.
‘4G will have a profound effect’
Perhaps the most prescient thing Cook said in that interview had nothing to do with Apple directly. It was about a network upgrade that hadn’t quite happened yet.
On the impending launch of 4G, he said: “I think there is going to be a fairly rapid change. It is not going to happen tomorrow and there is a journey there, but I see the seeds already planted and we are going to grow very fast over the next several months.”
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At the time, India’s internet was slow, patchy, and expensive. The idea that this would change overnight seemed optimistic at best.
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Then, within months of that conversation, Reliance Jio launched. Data prices collapsed. Hundreds of millions of Indians came online for the first time. The smartphone market transformed almost overnight.
Apple’s growth curve in India since 2017 tracks almost perfectly against the country’s 4G, and now 5G, expansion. Cook saw the infrastructure before the infrastructure existed. He bet on India’s ambition, not just its present.
‘The retail stores are not just about selling’
When we asked Cook why Apple was pushing so hard for its own stores rather than simply relying on established chains like Croma or the network of Imagine resellers that had been selling Apple products for years, his answer was characteristically direct.
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“It is clear that we need an Apple retail presence over time, so we are working on that as well. Again, we are looking at it from many different angles and not solely from a market point of view.”
What he didn’t say was that the third-party experience was often inconsistent, transactional, and far from what Apple wanted customers to feel when they walked in to buy a Rs 1 lakh phone.
Getting there took seven years. Apple spent the better part of a decade negotiating India’s local sourcing requirements, which mandated that a certain percentage of products sold in a single-brand retail store be manufactured locally. It was a bureaucratic marathon.
Apple BKC in Mumbai and Apple Saket in Delhi finally opened in April 2023, with Cook himself flying in for the occasion. Both stores are now among the highest-grossing retail locations per square foot in India.
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Are good phones bad business?
Asked if he thought making good phones made good business sense anymore, he said, “Our focus is on the customer and doing the best thing for the customers; we put our own interests second. We believe that if we do the right thing for the customer, the byproduct of doing that is that you have a good business.”
In the Indian market, Apple now stands out for having phones that last the longest and, therefore, command the initial premium and resale value.
The conversation we had with Cook in 2016 is a small but telling window into how he thought. Not in quarters. Not even in years. In decades, in ecosystems, in foundations laid so carefully that by the time the results showed up, they looked inevitable.
For India, they were planned.
