Apple Is Very Close To Opening Its Store In Mumbai, Its First Official Store In India

Congratulations Apple fans, you're about to get the first official Apple store in India.

Reports indicate the company has finalised a short list of locations where the store may open up. And good news for Mumbaikars, it's going to be somewhere in your city.

Images courtesy: Reuters

The iPhone maker has reportedly picked a few upscale sites in Mumbai, and plans to reveal its decision within the next few weeks. Supposedly, the locations are equivalent to Apple's stores on Fifth Avenue in New York, Regent Street in London or the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

Basically, it might be the classiest store India has ever seen.

Apple had so far been blocked from opening a local store, given that it doesn't source products locally. However, given that the company is shifting a lot of its manufacturing to India for the local market, they're currently in talks with the government to discuss setting up shop here.

It's all part of Apple's push to increase its slice of the smartphone market share in India, now that its sales have been stagnating in its other biggest markets, China and the US. Of course, in India they'll still be competing against the likes of Xiaomi, OnePlus, Huawei, and more.

Apple's Fifth Avenue store

More importantly, aside from opening up a storefront in Mumbai, manufacturing locally will allow them to avoid the 20 percent tariff on imported phones, allowing them to price them cheaper.

"India is a very important market in the long term," Cook said while reporting the company's earnings last week. "It's a challenging market in the short term, but we're learning a lot. We plan on going in there with sort of all of our might."