How Real Is India’s Smartphone Win

India’s mobile phone manufacturing surge is often celebrated as the crown jewel of “Make in India.” Production has skyrocketed to ₹5.45 lakh crore in FY25, exports now touch $24.1 billion, and finished-phone imports have nearly vanished. As of 2024, India stands as the world’s third-largest smartphone exporter. This growth didn’t happen overnight—it is the direct outcome of deliberate policy pushes like the National Policy on Electronics (2019) and the smartphone PLI scheme. Yet the boom has its skeptics. Critics argue India has created heavily subsidised “screwdriver assembly” units that add little value, generate too few jobs, and rely on imported high-value components. The debate matters deeply: India needs 90 million non-farm jobs by 2030. If phone manufacturing is truly a scalable pathway, it could transform the economy; if it’s a dead-end, it risks misallocating an entire decade’s worth of industrial policy. A recent Centre for Development Studies report offers a balanced assessment. It finds that while India began at the lowest end of the value chain, the sector is steadily moving up. Adjusting for components used outside phone factories, the report shows a genuine export surplus since 2022. Domestic value added in phones has climbed from ~9% before 2019 to 23% by FY23, reflecting rising localisation—from circuits to plastic parts to packaging. India created over 2.5 lakh direct factory jobs and nearly 15 lakh allied jobs, a 30x increase since FY17. While most value still resides abroad, India is climbing the “smile curve” by mastering scale first—much like China, Vietnam and earlier East Asian economies. The PLI is essentially a bet: capture the low end now, then rise higher as global supply chains diversify away from China. The evidence so far suggests India is not stuck—it is advancing. The challenge ahead is ensuring the climb continues. Stocks that could benefit from India’s smartphone manufacturing boom