Can India Go Beyond Smartphone Assembly?

India's next leap in electronics manufacturing is both promising and full of complexities

- Shelley Singh

Over the past decade, India's electronics manufacturing sector has been defined by one thing: the mobile phone. From 2014 to 2024, the country went from assembling less than 30% of the phones it consumed to 99%, thanks largely to the ₹1.9 trillion Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme.

According to the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), the value of India's electronics production rose nearly fivefold to ₹19.5 trillion in 2023-24, from ₹1.9 trillion in 2014-15.

Yet, for all the triumph in scale, for India to emerge as a global manufacturing powerhouse, it has to go beyond smartphones and also break free from its role as an assembly shop.

To make mobile phones, electronic manufacturing services (EMS—or contract manufacturers) companies depend on imports of key components, including cameras, displays, high-end battery packs, semiconductors, and printed circuit boards (PCBs).

Even other electronic products—smart TVs, CCTV cameras, computers, wearables, and hearables—are assembled from imported components.

If product assembly is about managing global supply chains and focuses on integration and system-level performance, "manufacturing of components involves deeper scientific and engineering complexity," says Vinod Sharma, chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)'s National Committee on Electronics Manufacturing.

Components are the DNA of electronics. However, the components that go into electronic goods in India are still largely sourced from China, Korea, and Taiwan.

"Even now, 85-90% of the electronics component value is imported," says a MeitY report. In 2023, only $15 billion of India's $101 billion electronics output came from components, the report noted.