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The iPhone is Apple’s most profitable and best-selling product. More than a billion have been sold since the first one was released.

About half of all iPhones now are made in a huge manufacturing facility in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou. This is the story of how an iPhone made there can end up in your hands.

Getting the Parts

Components from more than 200 suppliers go into each iPhone.

Apple buys many of the components for iPhones — like the memory chip, the modem, the camera module, the microphone and the touch-screen controller — from more than 200 suppliers around the world. Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that runs the Zhengzhou facility, even produces some smaller parts, such as metal casings.

Apple orders many of the components from global suppliers, and then sells them, en masse, to one of its contract manufacturers based in China. In Zhengzhou, that means Foxconn.