Tech Telecom

In the last decade, when it comes to local manufacturing, India’s mobile industry has experienced strong growth. The mobile sector in the country has seen a 20 times growth over the past nine years, said Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister for Information and Communication. The fact that the majority of mobile phones manufactured by large manufacturers in India are only produced here makes this a very substantial change, since more jobs and investments have been generated by major telecommunications companies.

The production value of smartphones in 2014-15 in India was Rs 18,900 crore. The figure jumped to Rs 3,50,000 crore in 2022-23. In a Twitter post in X, Vaishnaw said that 78% of the smartphones sold in the Indian market in 2014 were imported. But in 2023, 99.2% of all mobiles sold were ‘Made in India’.

This development is an indication of a continuous investment by OEMs in the country to build production and manufacturing facilities. The production and assembly of the products in India is done by key mobile phone producers such as Apple, Samsung or a number of China’s companies. Moreover, it has been reported on the Internet that Apple is planning to shift a large proportion of its iPhone and other device production in the next three to five years from China to India.

The government of India has already launched a PLI linked production incentive scheme for the manufacture of mobile phones, which has been allocated a sum of INR 40,000 crores. This scheme would be welcomed by many companies which had previously manufactured mobile phones in India and other parts of the world. The government, too, has been actively promoting the establishment of a semiconductor ecosystem in India and its own programme for PLI was also proposed.

Due to their strong national supply chains for semiconductors, technology firms and mobile producers will gain tremendously from the concentration of worldwide semiconductor production in a couple of regions which can cause price volatility if there’s an issue with trade.