As India’s current phone manufacturing incentive program is about to expire, the country is planning fresh incentives to keep production growing. Here are the details.
India doubles down on recent manufacturing surge
While Apple has diversified its production away from China over the years, its efforts intensified last year, as President Trump started his global tariff war.
As a result, India emerged as one of Apple’s new manufacturing hubs, reaching the milestone of assembling about a quarter of the company’s iPhones, per a report released earlier this week.
Part of this successful shift was due to India’s Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme, which offers financial incentives to companies that manufacture smartphones locally.
Now, as reported by Reuters, India is planning fresh incentives set to kick in after the current PLI scheme expires later this month.
As part of the new plan, the Indian government is reportedly considering linking incentives to export performance. This could be an effective way to encourage companies to use the country as their global manufacturing hub, rather than just for domestic sales.
The timing is notable: Apple is reportedly aiming to move about half of its iPhone production to India within a year, even as a U.S. court ruling invalidating Trump’s fentanyl-related tariff on China could reduce India’s leverage.
Be that as it may, according to Reuters, India “produced nearly $60 billion worth of mobiles in the 2024-25 fiscal year, a 28-fold jump over a decade,” adding that as a part of “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s agenda to bolster domestic manufacturing,” the country “aims to expand its electronics manufacturing to $500 billion by the fiscal year 2030.”
The report also claims that the country’s “Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has held consultations with the industry on designing the scheme,” but declined to comment when contacted.
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