Value addition in mobile phones needs to go up to 40%: Meity Secretary

While almost all mobile phones sold in India are made indigenously, local value addition in the devices needs to go up to 40 per cent and the government is focussing on building a component base in the country for that, a senior official said on Tuesday.

While speaking at Global Technology Summit 2023, Ministry of Electronics and IT Secretary S Krishnan said that no country in the world can make 100 per cent of entire high technology products as the supply chain is spread across the globe.

"Almost the entire requirement of our mobile phones being manufactured in India. We also need to realize that in many of these places, the value addition is probably about 10 to 15 per cent. We need to go closer to about 35 per cent to 40 per cent. For this reality to happen the government of India's interest is how do you bring in component manufacturing in the country," Krishnan said.

He said that there are economists who question the level of value addition achieved under the production-linked incentive programme.

"We need to recognize that these are parts of global value chains. No country in the world, not even China has more than about 40 to 45 per cent of that value chain embedded within the country," Krishnan said.

He quoted global chipset firm NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's statement that the United States needs 20 years to completely have the semiconductor chip manufacturing.

He said that chip manufacturing started in the United States but because semiconductor has a global value chain, it went across the world.

"I don't think in today's world in the way that we are connected we want to make 100 per cent of any of these high-value products right there," Krishnan said.