New briefing

 

        Shen Qing-fang, chairman of Zhen Ding, declared at the Industry Summit Forum of the 2019 TPCA SHOW that Zhen Ding has established SMT production lines for mobile phones in India, but will not, for the time being, produce PCB in India.

 

Impact analysis

 

         India has quite a few PCB manufacturers (about 200), and the development time has been rather long. However, the size of these manufacturers is still small and medium, so the output value is not large. In recent years, the output value has been about US$1.3 billion, while almost all of the PCB manufacturers in India are local manufacturers. Apart from AT&S, India has hardly any large foreign PCB manufacturers. Therefore, the Indian PCB industry has made slow progress in technology and output value. Although the scale of India's PCB industry is not large, its manufacturers can still profit from the production of PCB products as it meets the needs of local electronics manufacturers with inexpensive and low-end machinery and equipment. However, becoming medium and large-sized manufacturers is quite difficult for them.

 

 

           In the past, India has imported about US$250 million to US$300 million of PCB each year. However, the size of the domestic electronic market has gradually increased in recent years, so that both domestic and foreign demands for PCB from electronic assembly plants has increased. This explains why the amount of imported PCB has soared to nearly US$400 million every year. In order to encourage the local manufacturing of mobile phones, the government has levied 11.5% of differential tariffs on imported mobile phones, with a plan to place an additional 2% tariff on imported PCB.

 

 

Although such local mobile phone manufacturers as Micromax, Karbonn, Lave, and Intex have all carried out phone manufacturing in India, while Samsung has also set up a smart phone manufacturing plant in Rupee. Furthermore, others such as Lenovo, Huawei, and Xiaomi, have indicated that they would set up factories in India. Nevertheless, the timing remains yet matured for upstream PCB manufacturers to relocate before local infrastructure has been fully perfected and supporting industries, including materials, equipment, chemicals, and others, are rendered available. Therefore, Taiwanese PCB manufacturers feel no urgency to immediately head to India to set up factories.