SRINAGAR: India’s electronics manufacturing landscape has witnessed a rapid transformation over the past decade, yet the economic value captured by homegrown brands remains strikingly modest, reveals a new joint study by India Mobile Congress and technology market research firm Techarc.
The inaugural edition of the Viksit Tech 47 Report 2026, titled Building India’s Global Brands, shows that while India produced electronics worth Rs 13.11 lakh crore and exported goods worth Rs 4.24 lakh crore in FY2025–26, domestic brands captured only a fraction of that overall worth. The study mapped 129 qualifying Indian-owned consumer hardware brands across gadgets, devices, appliances, and connected cars, finding their combined annual revenue stands at just over Rs 60,000 crore. This translates to an average revenue of merely Rs 465 crore per brand, highlighting a sharp gap between domestic factory output and intellectual ownership.
Only 14 of the 129 indexed companies generate more than Rs 500 crore in annual revenue, and just two have managed to clearly cross the Rs 2,000 crore mark.
Sobering Baseline
The study establishes the Viksit Tech 47 Index across four major industry pillars: Gadgets, Devices, Appliances, and Connected Cars. Gadgets and Devices account for 55 brands each, followed by 16 in Appliances and three in Connected Cars. While Indian firms have established a notable footprint in smartwatches, wireless audio, consumer IoT, and connected water purifiers, their presence remains virtually absent in high-value segments like smart televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines beyond legacy domestic players.
Furthermore, domestic value addition in hardware production stands at approximately 17 per cent. The bulk of high-value components—ranging from semiconductor chipsets and displays to camera modules and advanced battery cells—continues to rely heavily on foreign imports. Homegrown brands also command only a low single-digit market share in their domestic smartphone market, as volume gains under incentive programmes have accrued predominantly to multinational brands and contract electronics manufacturing services providers.
TAME Framework
To explain these growth ceilings, the report introduces the TAME framework—an evolutionary progression tracking companies across four phases: Trade, Assemble, Manufacture, and Engineer. The study finds that brands relying purely on trading imported white-label goods hit an inherent ceiling of about Rs 500 crore due to thin margins and zero product differentiation.
Moving into local kit assembly raises that threshold to approximately Rs 5,000 crore, while end-to-end manufacturing capabilities with board-level assembly can propel brand revenues towards Rs 50,000 crore. However, the report stresses that global scale—characterised by revenues in lakhs of crores—is attained solely at the Engineer tier, where companies design their own hardware, develop proprietary firmware and software, and build indigenous intellectual property. The current Rs 465 crore average revenue indicates that most Indian brands remain locked in the Trade or early Assemble tiers.
Decade Gains
The study contextualises these challenges against unprecedented manufacturing growth catalyzed by Digital India, Make in India, and Startup India. Mobile phone production expanded from Rs 18,900 crore in FY2014–15 to Rs 6.27 lakh crore in FY2025–26, transforming handsets into India’s single largest export commodity at Rs 2.60 lakh crore. Cumulatively, the Production Linked Incentive scheme for large-scale electronics manufacturing attracted Rs 20,600 crore in investment, yielded Rs 11.62 lakh crore in production, and generated 1.8 lakh direct jobs through March 2026.
Supply chain depth is gaining traction under the expanded Rs 40,000 crore Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme, which has approved 106 projects across 15 states with Rs 69,548 crore in committed capital. Meanwhile, public capital markets have begun financing homegrown hardware, following early listings by contract manufacturers such as Dixon Technologies and brand owners including MapmyIndia, Cellecor, and Aditya Infotech.
Road Ahead
Looking forward, the report projects that indexed brands will expand at an expected compound annual growth rate of 13 per cent to reach Rs 1.11 lakh crore by FY2031 and Rs 2.04 lakh crore by FY2036. Under an accelerated scenario of 16 per cent annual growth, these numbers could reach Rs 1.26 lakh crore and Rs 2.65 lakh crore respectively.
To realise the long-term national goal of Viksit Bharat, the study outlines a target for 2047: building 50 homegrown hardware technology brands that each generate more than Rs 1 lakh crore in annual turnover. This represents an 83-fold expansion from the current revenue baseline, necessitating a sustained compound annual growth rate of 25 per cent over the next two decades.
Achieving this transition demands two structural interventions. First, India must foster new, IP-centric product companies by bridging deep-tech academia—including IITs and design institutions—with entrepreneurial startups to commercialise indigenous hardware designed for global markets. Second, policymakers and industry stakeholders must deploy tailored interventions for existing firms at each TAME juncture, providing testing infrastructure, patient venture capital, and export development to help domestic brands break through their revenue ceilings.
