The Smartphone PLI Scheme

Imagine India importing nearly every mobile phone its citizens used as recently as the mid-2010s, and a single production-linked incentive scheme, launched in 2020 specifically for large-scale electronics manufacturing, reversing that dependency so completely that India now produces roughly $60 billion worth of mobile phones annually, with global brands including Apple manufacturing a meaningful share of their worldwide output directly on Indian soil rather than treating India purely as a sales market.

The scheme's mechanics mirror the same production-linked incentive logic covered under PLI IT Hardware 2.0 elsewhere on this site, but applied specifically to mobile phones, global and domestic manufacturers receive financial incentives tied directly to incremental production and export volume achieved above a baseline, rewarding genuine scaling of Indian manufacturing output rather than simply subsidising existing production levels.

Apple's participation, joining in the 2021-22 financial year, became the scheme's single most visible success story, iPhone production in India surged 53 percent in 2025 alone to 55 million units, roughly a quarter of Apple's entire global iPhone output, with cumulative iPhone exports from India crossing $50 billion by December 2025 and hitting a record ₹2 trillion in FY26, the scheme's final year, transforming India from a negligible iPhone assembly location into a genuinely central node in Apple's global supply chain within just a few years.

This scheme's success connects directly to India's broader $500 billion electronics manufacturing target by 2030, covered under the $300 Billion Electronics Manufacturing Target discussion elsewhere on this site, mobile phones specifically have become the single largest product category driving that broader ambition forward, proving that India could compete for genuinely large-scale, export-oriented electronics assembly, not just serve its own large domestic consumer market, a distinction that matters enormously for whether India's electronics manufacturing story becomes globally significant or remains primarily domestic-focused.