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Cronyism or protectionism? India halts import of electronic items

Bilal9

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Modi's buddy launches Jio Laptop and Modi bans all electronics imports to India.

Another crony-capitalism Banana Republic at work...


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I see a windfall for smugglers from Bangladesh smuggling Bangladeshi laptops to India. :-)
 
Not well thought out protectionism that will end up as cronyism.

What incentives do companies have to invest and invest in the hopes that they will one day become competitive in a saturated market.

They will cut corners to earn profits and be caught soon enough as assembling most of the parts made in other countries, especially China.

It’s an easy scam to see. Probably will take about 2-3 years probably 5 years tops to come to light, because of China’s sunk cost (vertical and horizontal integration of whole industries in one place) in many of these fields and therefore lower cost to manufacture at scale.

If these companies earn profits earn on, it’s a dead give away the aren’t manufacturing locally. It may also indicate they have been given sweetheart deals and carve outs to artificially give them market share in a quid pro quo for funding a certain politician or party.
 
Modi's buddy launches Jio Laptop and Modi bans all electronics imports to India.

HP, Dell and Lenovo already have assembly plants in India. Jio doesn't, if anything this move would only gravely effect Modi's buddy. However I think the real aim of this move is to make Apple start manufacturing Macbooks in India.
 
Not well thought out protectionism that will end up as cronyism.

What incentives do companies have to invest and invest in the hopes that they will one day become competitive in a saturated market.

They will cut corners to earn profits and be caught soon enough as assembling most of the parts made in other countries, especially China.

It’s an easy scam to see. Probably will take about 2-3 years probably 5 years tops to come to light, because of China’s sunk cost (vertical and horizontal integration of whole industries in one place) in many of these fields and therefore lower cost to manufacture at scale.

If these companies earn profits earn on, it’s a dead give away the aren’t manufacturing locally. It may also indicate they have been given sweetheart deals and carve outs to artificially give them market share in a quid pro quo for funding a certain politician or party.

It's a blade that unfortunately cuts both ways.

You're screwed if you don't allow electronics imports, and screwed if you do.

The "swadeshi" garbage Indian politicians have pushed looked great on paper (to mainly get votes) but did jack for hardware mfg. in India. I recall an Indian friend telling me that HCL-HP was trying to make desktops in India back in the 1990's and no one bought their stuff except some govt. offices. They waited, waited and waited. And now it is a bit late. Never too late however.

They talk about boycotting China but the top three cellphone brands in India are Chinese. I rest my case.

Meanwhile - look at the type of products Walton in Bangladesh is producing and has a robust market for, like peripherals (including the laptops shown above).

Desktop PC's
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All in One PC's
1691552273872.png


SATA SSD storage drives
1691552424456.png


Micro SD cards
1691552465136.png


Smartwatches
1691552574407.png


1691552842537.png


"PaiPai" Integrated Point of Sales solutions
1691552630492.png


Smart Card Access Control and Office Worker Time Mgmt. system with fingerprint scanner
1691552715167.png


Multi-function printers
1691555260782.png


English+Bengali Keyboard
1691555309470.png


MU-MIMO-Wi-Fi router
1691555430282.png


They won the INTEL Best Market Accelerator of Asia award
1691552358308.png
 
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They will cut corners to earn profits and be caught soon enough as assembling most of the parts made in other countries, especially China.
The most expensive parts of a laptop/smartphone such as Processor, memory chip, camera lens and touchscreen are all made in either Japan, SK or Taiwan. Some other critical parts such as gyroscope come from Germany and other countries. If I remember correctly, even for China the IPhone indigenization percentage by value is around 20-25%.
IMG-20230619-WA0003(1).jpg

Until 2019, it was actually less than 10%. Only recently did China start manufacturing batteries, speakers etc for the IPhone which increased their percentage.

I hope at least in the next few years we can develop expertise in medium value components such as batteries and speakers.Now even though the percentage of Chinese components has increased. You can see, for most of the countries it is around 20%.

What is the threshold of value addition, for a country to be considered an laptop/smartphone manufacturers. The suppliers are distributed accross the global & none of them have a majority stake (50% value addition) in laptop/smartphone manufacturing.

Most ICs like DRAM, Flash, Processors, MEMS, camera module, display, semiconductor and battery cells are made in Taiwan, US, Japan or Korea.
These items are the crown jewels of those countries, and also make a large portion of the Bill-of-Materials cost of a laptop/smartphone and super spy like China also has troubles stealing said tech, so at best they are limited to low end production of such items, like their ICs will use a larger technology node( SMIC of China theoretically can do 14nm chip production, their production in reality is 20nm and below, meanwhile you have TSMC at 5nm )

The only state of the art Chinese production of this is of NAND Flash by Samsung in Xian and SK Hynix somewhere else in China.

What parts they add into their laptop/smartphones depends on what $$$ it's going to sell for,high end laptops/smartphones with cutting edge specs will have higher percentage of imported components which are indeed state of the art, lower end phones will have greater chinese contribution, like the screen may come from BOE displays which is a chinese vendor for example.

But even with low end laptops/smartphones they cannot fully supplant the Ebul Phoreners and go full Atmanirbhar Cheen, market forces and customer preferences discourage it, also the capabilities of their companies.
 
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^^^

@beijingwalker brother is he correct (I don't believe so)?

Feel free to have other Chinese brothers post information.
Some even believe that BOE will be left out of the contract this year with Samsung taking the remaining orders

What parts they add into their laptop/smartphones depends on what $$$ it's going to sell for,high end laptops/smartphones with cutting edge specs will have higher percentage of imported components which are indeed state of the art, lower end phones will have greater chinese contribution, like the screen may come from BOE displays which is a chinese vendor for example
Screenshot_20230809-104603_Chrome.jpg
@Bilal9
 
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The cheapest Laptop available in Bangladesh is priced around Tk.25,000. However it is spec'd out better than that Jiobook sold in India.

1691558520251.png
 
It's a blade that unfortunately cuts both ways.

You're screwed if you don't allow electronics imports, and screwed if you do.

The "swadeshi" garbage Indian politicians have pushed looked great on paper (to mainly get votes) but did jack for hardware mfg. in India. I recall an Indian friend telling me that HCL-HP was trying to make desktops in India back in the 1990's and no one bought their stuff except some govt. offices. They waited, waited and waited. And now it is a bit late. Never too late however.

They talk about boycotting China but the top three cellphone brands in India are Chinese. I rest my case.

Meanwhile - look at the type of products Walton in Bangladesh is producing and has a robust market for, like peripherals (including the laptops shown above).

Desktop PC's
View attachment 944662


All in One PC's
View attachment 944663

SATA SSD storage drives
View attachment 944665

Micro SD cards
View attachment 944666

Smartwatches
View attachment 944667

View attachment 944672

"PaiPai" Integrated Point of Sales solutions
View attachment 944668

Smart Card Access Control and Office Worker Time Mgmt. system with fingerprint scanner
View attachment 944669

Multi-function printers
View attachment 944677

English+Bengali Keyboard
View attachment 944678

MU-MIMO-Wi-Fi router
View attachment 944679

They won the INTEL Best Market Accelerator of Asia award
View attachment 944664
Lol. India would have 70 startups that have better market capitalization than Balton let alone listed companies. @Bilal9 With all this, why is Balton only making 23 crore taka in profit per quarter?
 

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