India bets billions on breaking China’s grip on smartphone manufacturing
India launched a ₹625 billion (about $6.5 billion) five-year scheme to boost smartphone manufacturing with incentives up to 5%, plus an additional ₹1.28 trillion (around $13.3 billion) to expand domestic semiconductor production. Apple now assembles about 25% of its iPhones in India, but China still accounts for 63% of global smartphone production versus India’s 18%. The new incentives aim to deepen local value capture and R&D, though India remains far behind China in scale.
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India’s ₹1.905 tn (~$22.8 bn) incentive stack is large by Indian standards, but even at 5% of total outlay the per-unit subsidy looks modest vs China’s R&D tax credits (~10–15 %) and cash grants (up to ~25 % for fabs in key regions). Unless the PLI outlays are back-loaded or paired with FDI mandates on R&D spend, the base-rate gain in India’s global market share is likely to be <2 ppt by 2027, per past PLI cycles.