Apple Overtakes HUL: How an iPhone Became Bigger Business Than India's Soap-to-Shampoo Giant

For decades, Hindustan Unilever was the default proxy for "the Indian consumer", soaps, shampoos, tea, detergent, in every kirana store in the country. That's no longer the bigger business in India. Apple India's revenue is expected to reach ₹1.42 lakh crore in FY26, according to a Kotak Mutual Fund report more than double Hindustan Unilever's projected ₹64,468 crore for the same period. The projections are based on company filings and estimates from Avendus Spark.

The reversal is stark when you look at where both companies started just five years ago:

This marks a reversal from FY21, when Apple's India revenue stood at ₹22,845 crore — less than half of HUL's ₹47,028 crore. Apple's growth trajectory has been significantly sharper, with revenue increasing 6.2 times over the past five years, while HUL's growth has been far more moderate, reflecting a divergence between mass and premium consumption trends. By FY24, Apple had already edged ahead — ₹67,121 crore against HUL's ₹61,896 crore — and by FY26 the gap has widened into a chasm.

HUL isn't shrinking — it's growing slowly, in a business that was built for scale, not for the kind of premium storytelling that drives smartphone upgrades. A few forces are behind the sluggishness:

1. Urban demand has been stuck. HUL's underlying volume growth has repeatedly come in below market expectations — in one recent quarter it posted 3% volume growth against expectations of 5%, with personal care and food & refreshment categories seeing low single-digit volume declines and revenue actually contracting in those segments due to price actions and softer demand. Analysts have consistently flagged the same culprit: a gradual recovery in rural markets is being offset by moderation in urban markets, and high food inflation combined with a consumer shift toward e-commerce has dampened growth specifically in urban metros.

2. Inflation is squeezing margins even when sales hold up. HUL's EBITDA margin contracted to 23.5% in one recent quarter, reflecting inflationary pressure on key commodities such as palm oil, tea, and coffee, and margins dipped to 23.1% in another quarter, down 30 basis points year-on-year, even after the company cut advertising spend by 3% and pushed operational efficiency drives. When your raw material costs rise faster than you can pass them on to a price-sensitive Indian consumer, both volume and margin suffer together.

3. Structural shift away from mass staples. HUL's core business soaps, detergents, packaged tea is a low-margin, high-volume, replacement category. There's a ceiling to how much revenue growth that generates in a market where rural markets alone account for 40% of HUL's revenue and rural wage growth, not aspiration, is the primary demand driver. India's consumption story has increasingly moved toward what analysts call premiumisation, and HUL has responded for instance acquiring the premium beauty brand Minimalist for ₹2,955 crore in 2024, but that shift takes years to move the needle on a ₹64,000 crore revenue base.

4. GST and policy uncertainty added near-term drag. HUL's share price fell further in September 2025 as concerns mounted over the impact of GST reforms on sales, compounding an already sluggish demand backdrop.

In short: HUL is a bellwether for mass India, and mass India's wallet has been growing slowly. Apple is a bellwether for aspirational India, and that wallet has been opening fast.

Apple's India revenue growing 6.2x in five years isn't an accident of currency or accounting, it reflects a genuine, multi-pronged strategy executed almost flawlessly over that window.

1. India became a premium smartphone story, and Apple owns premium. In India, Apple commands the dominant share of the premium smartphone market specifically the $600-plus segment, where its share rose to 64% in one recent quarter, up from 56% a year earlier. As India's middle class has expanded, buyers have been trading up rather than just buying more units average smartphone selling prices in India are forecast to rise 5% in 2026, after a 9% increase in 2025, even as overall unit shipments stay roughly flat. Apple sits precisely at the top of that curve.

2. Local manufacturing under India's PLI scheme cut costs and de-risked supply. iPhone production in India jumped by roughly 53% in 2025, with 55 million units assembled locally about 25% of Apple's total global output — up from 36 million units the year before. This build-out was accelerated by U.S.-China trade tensions and tariffs that pushed Apple to shift a greater share of devices meant for the American market to alternative manufacturing bases, with India emerging as the biggest beneficiary. Apple's manufacturing partners in India include Foxconn, Tata Electronics, and Pegatron, and crucially, India's production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme provided financial subsidies that made manufacturing in the country more cost-effective, which in turn has allowed Apple's average selling price in India to soften — dropping from $1,084 to $958 in one recent quarter making iPhones more accessible without hurting margins the way pure price cuts would.

3. Aggressive retail and financing expansion put Apple in front of Indian consumers. Apple opened its first physical retail stores in Mumbai and Delhi in April 2023, followed by Bengaluru, Pune and Noida, reaching six stores by February 2026. The company has also leaned on financing plans, which analysts credit as a key factor making Apple's premium products more accessible to a broader base of Indian buyers who couldn't otherwise pay upfront for a flagship device.

4. India-specific pricing on services widened the funnel. Apple has also localized its pricing strategy beyond hardware, it launched Apple Creator Studio, a bundle of apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, priced at ₹399/month in India around 66% cheaper than the $12.99/month charged in the US, a sign of deliberate market-specific pricing to deepen penetration rather than a one-size-fits-all global price list.

5. India is becoming central to Apple's global strategy, not just a sales market. Apple increased iPhone production in India by about 53% in the most recent year and now makes roughly a quarter of its iPhones there, and India is set to become Apple's third-largest market by 2026, behind only the US and China, with local sales expected to grow as much as 20% in the following year a status upgrade from being merely Apple's fifth-largest market a few years earlier. This dual role as both a fast-growing consumer market and an increasingly critical manufacturing and export hub is what has let Apple justify the scale of investment (retail stores, financing tie-ups, localized pricing, supply chain build-out) that a company chasing a smaller, less strategic market wouldn't make.

The Apple-vs-HUL revenue crossover captures something larger than a corporate scoreboard: it's a proxy for how India's consumption economy itself is bifurcating. The shift is widely read as a reflection of India's more affluent consumers changing their spending patterns toward premium technology and discretionary products, and away from traditional staples. India's overall FMCG market, valued at over ₹6.5 lakh crore, is still expected to grow at a healthy 10–12% CAGR through 2030, so this isn't a story of FMCG dying. It's a story of the growth mix shifting sharply toward premium and discretionary categories, with Apple positioned as the poster child of that shift, and mass-market players like HUL needing to fight harder for a smaller share of incremental spending.

For investors, the lesson isn't "sell HUL, buy Apple", HUL remains a cash-generative, low-leverage business with genuine long-term rural upside, while Apple India's blistering growth rate will inevitably decelerate as its base gets larger. But the crossover is a useful real-time indicator of where discretionary Indian rupees are flowing right now — and it's flowing toward the products that signal status and aspiration, not just the ones that sit under the kitchen sink.