The Push to Build Laptop Motherboards in India

Imagine a laptop assembled in India under PLI IT Hardware 2.0, covered elsewhere on this site, but its motherboard, genuinely the single most complex and value-dense component inside the device, integrating the processor socket, memory slots and countless supporting circuits onto a single multi-layer printed circuit board, still being imported fully populated from established manufacturing hubs abroad, meaning the domestic assembly happening in India represents only the final, comparatively simpler step in a much longer manufacturing chain still concentrated overseas.

Syrma SGS's roughly $180 million investment in a new plant near Naidupeta, Andhra Pradesh, expected to create over 2,100 high-skill jobs, specifically targets this gap, building genuine domestic capability for both bare PCB manufacturing and, notably, local laptop motherboard production, a meaningfully deeper localisation step than simply assembling an imported, pre-populated motherboard into a finished laptop chassis.

This effort connects directly to India's broader bare PCB market growth covered throughout this page, projected to expand from $3.5 billion in 2024 to $8.2 billion by 2030, a roughly 15 percent annual growth rate reflecting how PCB demand scales directly with the broader electronics assembly boom, smartphones, laptops, networking equipment and IoT devices, covered elsewhere on this site, all requiring PCBs as their foundational circuit board layer.

This laptop motherboard localisation push represents a genuinely meaningful test of how deep India's electronics manufacturing localisation can actually go, covered throughout this page, succeeding here would mean India has moved beyond final assembly toward genuine mid-stream component manufacturing for one of electronics' most technically demanding product categories, a considerably harder achievement than the final-assembly-focused success stories, smartphones and basic laptop assembly, that have dominated the electronics manufacturing narrative until now.