Enigmatic Wizard

In 2009, two economists took an iPhone 3G apart. China’s share of the phone - $6.50, or 3.6%. China was a screwdriver shop, and if Bloomberg Opinion had existed in this form back then, it would have told Beijing to give up on electronics and stick to shoes. China didn’t listen. Today Chinese phones carry 38-40% local value. India is at 18-20%, which is already far ahead of where China started. Comparing India’s component imports with its phone exports and calling the gap a deficit is plain wrong. Indians buy phones either way. Without local assembly, every one of those phones arrives fully built and the import bill gets bigger. About $18.6B of India-made iPhones were sold in India between FY22 and FY26, and the $2.1B trade gain from mounting chips on boards locally shows the same thing. Assembly always comes first. No display or battery maker builds a plant in a country where nobody assembles phones. That’s how China used Tesla and Apple as “catfish” to pull its suppliers up to world standards. The subsidies to build local electronics manufacturing are often called too expensive . But Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China all paid to build their industries, and TSMC was nearly half government money. Under India’s component scheme (ECMS), 106 projects are approved, worth ₹69,500 cr. Display, camera module and battery cell, three of the five big imported parts in a phone, now have approved Indian plants. Taking an Indian iPhone apart in 2030 and seeing how much of it is still imported will be the time for a verdict swarajyamag.com/commentary/a…