India has 5% manufacturing capabilities of China and will be at least 2x expensive and slow. India also has strong labor laws and local politicians still need votes
That's not even close. Samsung,MI,Oppo and Vivo make almost all phones for India in India. If it was this expensive they will never make India
And why is it being assumed here that labor laws need to be suppressed to make iphone production viable?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD?most_rec...
China is at about $5 trillion, India about $450 billion. So it's not 5%, but we are still talking of an order of magnitude.
You’re complaining that india doesn’t have the manufacturing capability by pointing to the fact that stuff is not manufactured in India, in a thread that talks about manufacturing moving to India.
You realistically don’t have a way to measure capability.
I disagree with your objection. Actual current output is a great proxy for actual current manufacturing capability, assuming even a tiny bit of rationality. If the two are not linked like you imply - and in fact India already has as much capacity as China - then somebody built 10x more factories than they needed, and lost unimaginable amounts of money doing so. Is that what you're suggesting happened?
Now, the claim is not that the factories, supply chains, trained workforce, etc could not eventually scale to the same size in India as in China. But somebody actually needs to do that work. Until it is done, the capability possibly does not in exist.