India’s smartphone exports have been growing 40-50% a year for the past three years and have now overtaken traditional sectors like diamonds, apparel and rice.
In the last financial year, the overseas shipments of smartphones recorded a growth of 55% year-on-year to $24.14 billion.
“This performance has propelled smartphones to become one of India’s top exported goods, overtaking traditional ones for the first time, a senior official said.
With exports now exceeding $24 billion and the sector outpacing traditional export heavyweights, India is firmly on the path to becoming a leading player in the global smartphone market, he said.
“India has become a very consistent and significant player in the mobile market. We have created an ecosystem which is good for modern assembly making, as sophisticated assembly making as modern mobile phones require,” commerce secretary Sunil Barthwal had said.
It was in 2022-23 that the government started reporting smartphone export numbers outside of overall electronics exports. That year the exports of these phones was $ $10.96 billion.
India’s smartphone export has experienced an extraordinary surge, transforming the country into a major global manufacturing and export hub with a large credit going to the government initiatives, most notably the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, a senior official said.
The PLI has spurred investments, scaled up local production, and integrated India more deeply into global value chains, the official added.
In the financial year 2022-23, India’s smartphone exports stood at $11 billion, which then soared to $15.6 billion in 2023-24, marking a 42% year-on-year increase. The momentum continued into FY2024-25, with exports surpassing $24 billion – a 55% jump over the previous year.
In FY25, the top five nations where India registered the highest growth in smartphone exports were the United States, Netherlands, Italy, Japan, and Czech Republic. Exports to the US alone improved from $2.2 billion in FY23 to $10.6 billion in FY25. In the last financial year alone smartphone exports to US grew 89.65%.
A significant export growth of 530% was registered with Japan in FY25 where exports surged from $0.08 billion in FY24 to $1.2 billion in FY25.
