Mobilemakers hit by lack of skilled workers

New Delhi: India’s ambition to become a smartphone-making powerhouse are foundering over a lack of skilled labour and part suppliers along with a complex tax regime, industry executives say.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has championed a manufacturing drive, under the slogan ‘Make in India’, to boost the sluggish economy and create millions of jobs. Among the headline-grabbing details was a plan to eventually make Apple iPhones in India.

Three years on, as executives and bureaucrats crowded into a Delhi convention centre for an inaugural mobile congress last week, India has managed only to assemble phones from imported components.

While contract manufacturers such as iPhone-maker Foxconn  and Flextronics Corp have set up base in India, almost none of the higher value chip sets, cameras and other high-end components are made domestically. Plans for Foxconn to build an electronics plant in the state of Maharashtra, which local officials said in 2015 could employ some 50,000 people, have gone quiet.

According to tech research firm Counterpoint, while phones are assembled domestically because of taxes on imported phones, locally made content in those phones is usually restricted to headphones and chargers — about 5 per cent of a device’s cost.

“Rather than feeling that India is a place where I should be making mobile phones, it’s more like this is the place I need to (assemble) phones because there is lower duty if I import components and assemble here,” a senior executive with a Chinese smartphone maker said. He declined to be named for fear of harming business.

Others listed the lack of skilled workers and a sparse network of local component makers. They also cited high-profile tax disputes between India and foreign companies such as Nokia. Nokia eventually suspended mobile handset production at its southern India facility.

“The Nokia escapade is in people’s memory when they try to come here,” a second industry source told Reuters at the first Indian Mobile Congress in capital New Delhi, which ended on Friday. The GST, which kicked in this year to replace a string of different levies, is also fraught with its own challenges, such as a lengthy tax-refund process that delays payments to suppliers, the source added.

Last week, India rattled investors after publicly musing about possible changes in a $2.6 billion 2015 diesel locomotive contract with GE. The government has since said it would not take any hasty decisions. “We needed some push from the government to start manufacturing,” said Neeraj Sharma, the India head of Chinese chipmaker Spreadtrum.

“It was required, because without that nothing was happening.” But India now needs more sophisticated technology — such as surface-mounting technology, which places components directly on top of a printed board — to build a supply chain, he said.