India's ambitions to become a smartphone-making powerhouse are foundering over a lack of skilled labour and part suppliers along with a complex tax regime, industry executives say.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has championed a manufacturing drive, under the slogan 'Make in India', to boost the sluggish economy and create millions of jobs. Among the headline-grabbing details was a plan to eventually make Apple iPhones in India.
Three years on, as executives and bureaucrats crowded into a Delhi convention centre for an inaugural mobile congress last week, India has managed only to assemble phones from imported components.
While contract manufacturers such as iPhone-maker Foxconn Technology Co and Flextronics Corp have set up base in India, one of the world's fastest-growing smartphone markets, almost none of the higher value chip sets, cameras and other high-end components are made domestically.
Plans for Taiwan-based Foxconn to build an electronics plant in the state of Maharashtra, which local officials said in 2015 could employ some 50,000 people, have gone quiet.
According to tech research firm Counterpoint, while phones are assembled domestically because of taxes on imported phones, locally made content in those phones is usually restricted to headphones and chargers - about 5 percent of a device's cost.
"Rather than feeling that India is a place where I should be making mobile phones, it's more like this is the place I need to(assemble) phones because there is lower duty if I import components and assemble here," a senior executive with a Chinese smartphone maker said. He declined to be named for fear of harming business.
Comments
Post a Comment