India’s Own Apple and Samsung? Inside the Government’s New Plan to Build Homegrown Smartphone Giants
India now makes phones at a scale that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. It is the world’s second-largest mobile phone manufacturer by volume. About 99.2 per cent of the handsets used in the country are assembled here. Production has risen from ₹18,000 crore in 2014-15 to ₹6.27 lakh crore in 2025-26. Exports have jumped from ₹1,500 crore to ₹2.59 lakh crore over the same period — a 165-fold increase. Apple builds roughly a quarter of its global iPhones in India. Samsung and the major Chinese brands have large factories on Indian soil. Smartphones have become one of the country’s most important export products.
What India still does not have is a homegrown brand with the scale, design depth and consumer pull of Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi or Apple. That gap is the target of the government’s new Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme.
On 21 August 2026 the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology notified the ₹62,500 crore programme. It runs for five years, from FY 2026-27 to FY 2030-31, and succeeds the earlier Production Linked Incentive scheme for large-scale electronics manufacturing. Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has said India could see its first strong indigenous mobile brand by mid-2027, and that three potential Indian players could emerge in 10 to 14 months. The names have not been disclosed.
Factories without flags
The first PLI wave did what it was designed to do. It pulled global manufacturers and their contract partners into India, raised output and turned the country from a net importer of phones into a major exporter. Foxconn, Tata Electronics and other electronics manufacturing services firms now assemble devices at scale. Dixon Technologies expects to make 40–44 million smartphones in FY 2026 and 60–65 million in FY 2027.
The market that those factories serve is still dominated by foreign brands. Counterpoint Research data for the April–June 2026 quarter put Vivo and Samsung at about 18 per cent of shipments each, Oppo at 14 per cent and Xiaomi at 13 per cent. The UK-based brand Nothing was the fastest-growing player. Lava, the largest surviving Indian-owned brand, sits around 2 per cent of the market and does not even appear as a separate line in some share tables. Domestic value addition in mobile manufacturing is estimated at about 23 per cent. The chips, displays, cameras and software stacks that determine a phone’s identity still largely come from elsewhere.
India has been here before. Around 2015, Micromax, Lava, Intex and Karbonn together held roughly 35 per cent of the market. Micromax briefly looked like a serious challenger to Samsung. Then Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo and Realme arrived with deeper supply chains, faster product cycles, aggressive pricing and stronger retail and online distribution. Indian brands lacked scale with component suppliers, software expertise, camera and display engineering, and the volume needed to fund real R&D. Their combined share collapsed to well under 1 per cent by the early 2020s. Most of those names faded. Lava survived and has been growing again, particularly below ₹10,000, with a stated aim of 10 per cent in the sub-₹30,000 segment. Survival is not the same as building a Samsung.
What the new scheme actually pays for
The Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme is split into two tracks.
Target Segment 1 is for large-scale manufacturing, including foreign brands and contract manufacturers registered in India. Applicants generally need ₹10,000 crore turnover in FY 2025-26. Incentives range from 2.25 per cent to 5 per cent on eligible sales. An extra incentive of up to 1.5 per cent is available for sourcing specified key components and sub-assemblies in India, provided those parts are localised for at least 25 per cent of the units made in a year.
Target Segment 2 is reserved for Indian-owned brands. The bar on turnover is lower — ₹1,000 crore in FY 2025-26 — but the ownership test is strict. The company must be incorporated in India. Intellectual property and the trademark must be held in India. Management control must rest with Indian citizens. More than 51 per cent of the shareholding must be Indian. The firm must have in-house R&D and design capability in India. Qualifying brands get a flat 5 per cent on eligible sales, plus 3 per cent for Indian design and R&D, plus the same localisation add-on of up to 1.5 per cent. Combined, that can reach 9.5 per cent. A one-year gestation period is possible under this track. Sales and incentives are calculated brand by brand. The minister has been explicit that copycat designs will not qualify: the IP has to be genuinely Indian-owned and the product has to be able to compete in its segment.
Official targets for the five-year period include about ₹39 lakh crore of cumulative mobile phone production and around 60,000 direct jobs. The government also wants exports to rise substantially from the previous PLI cycle and domestic value addition to move toward 35–40 per cent. The scheme sits alongside Semicon 2.0, a ₹1.27 lakh crore semiconductor programme meant to deepen the chip, materials and design ecosystem that phones actually depend on.
Lava has said it will apply under the Indian-brand track. It has talked of investing about ₹1,100 crore over five years in display modules, camera modules, PCBs and enclosures. Its manufacturing arm has been expanding capacity in Greater Noida. Other Indian firms and contract manufacturers are expected to use the volume track. The policy does not shut out Apple or Samsung. Vaishnaw has said talks are on for Apple to assemble products beyond iPhones in India, including possibly iPads and Macs, and that India could take a larger share of Google’s export-oriented production now routed through China.
Why money alone may not be enough
A subsidy can lower the cost of making a phone. It cannot manufacture brand loyalty. Indian consumers already have a mature market of 150–160 million units a year. Any new Indian brand has to take share from companies that spend heavily on cameras, software, retail presence and annual launch calendars. Design talent, patents, after-sales networks and the ability to buy components at competitive prices still matter more than a percentage point of incentive.
There is also a structural risk. Under the first electronics PLI, a large share of payouts flowed to a small group of contract assemblers serving global brands. If the new corpus remains fully fungible between the two tracks, volume players could again absorb most of the money unless Indian-brand applications are scrutinised tightly. The government says it will evaluate IP ownership carefully and develop non-fiscal support with industry. That evaluation will decide whether this scheme produces real Indian products or only Indian letterheads on phones designed elsewhere.
The conditions are better than they were in 2015. India now has factories, a growing component base, export channels, and engineers who have already worked inside Apple and Samsung supply chains. Lava and a handful of others still exist. Three unnamed companies are in talks with the ministry. Mid-2027 is an aggressive date for a “strong” brand. Ten to fourteen months is even tighter for a phone that must prove its own design.
The factories are no longer the hard part. Owning the name on the box, the software stack and the patents inside it is. That is the bet the new plan is making.
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