The growth of India’s population, and particularly its middle class, is putting the country on track to overtake China, and edge closer to the USA, in a number of mobile industry metrics such as smartphone ownership and the consequent usage of mobile services. 4G smartphone sales in India broke the 100 million barrier for the first time in May 2023. India is growing rapidly in other mobile directions, notably its bid to be increasingly self-sufficient in core technologies such as 5G, and to be a major global manufacturing hub for smartphones and other electronics. The news that local industrial giant Tata is to acquire the iPhone factory currently owned by Taiwan’s Wistron is symbolic of the shift of mobile manufacturing…