India has potential to capture 50% of global mobile charger market: IAMAI

Mobile chargers produced in India have the potential to capture about 50 per cent of the global market under the government's new incentive scheme for electronic manufacturers, a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India said on Thursday.

The association also sees huge potential to scale up manufacturing of motherboard, technically called printed circuit board assembly (PCBA), and attract global companies by providing incentives on the same.

The government on April 1 notified three schemes, involving total incentives of around Rs 48,000 crore, to boost local electronics manufacturing and create 20 lakh direct and indirect jobs by 2025.

The government notified production linked incentive scheme (PLI) for large scale electronics manufacturing, scheme for promotion of manufacturing of electronic components and semiconductors (SPECS), and the modified electronics manufacturing clusters (EMC 2.0) scheme.

It expects to attract Rs 1 lakh crore investment in the sector and generate manufacturing revenue potential of Rs 10 lakh crore by 2025.

IAMAI report said that the global market for chargers in 2025 is estimated to be $10 billion (about Rs 76,000 crore), with smart chargers comprising around 70 per cent of the market.

India's export of all chargers rose from $143.05 million in 2016-17 to $366.78 million in 2019-20 (April-December), with an estimated compound annual growth rate of 40 per cent for last 3 years.

"Looking ahead, with a 5 per cent PLI, overall production of smartphone chargers in India can touch $6.5 billion, with the exports comprising $4.7 billion," the report said.

It said there is a need to provide continued support for manufacturing smartphone chargers and PCBA operations.

According to IAMAI, the PCB and PCBA industry is highly fragmented, with the bulk of the manufacturers based out of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, United States and China.

China accounted for 48.01 per cent of the global output volume of PCB and PCBA in 2017.

"In order to counter this inertia, and shift the PCB manufacturing to India, India should continue to incentivise PCBA at 5 per cent, as it can increase PCBA production to over $3 billion for the large-scale export-centric manufacturers in the country," the report said.

It added that India started mobile PCBA operations in the last few years, but the dependency on China continues to be high due to the absence of a domestic ecosystem of component manufacturers.

"This vulnerability has been exposed with the COVID-19 pandemic. A PLI support of around 5 per cent will boost the profitability of PCBA operations in India for large-scale export centric manufacturers and prompt PCBA operations to migrate from other manufacturing countries to India," the report said.