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Mint. “That creates an alternative to the China supply chain."For a company best known for consumer products, the shift marks a strategic expansion into the enterprise segment and reflects a broader shift in India’s manufacturing landscape.Many core components used in appliances, particularly motors, compressors and electronic controllers, have historically been imported largely from China.

Mint in an earlier interaction. LG Electronics, the largest consumer electronics brand in India, makes around 28% of its annual revenues in the January-March quarter.Awry predictions, then, can lead to a production-demand mismatch.

NEW DELHI: India’s steadily rising mobile phone exports, which generated $11 billion in revenue in the first six months of the current fiscal, are expected to take a multi-billion-dollar hit as a result of a prolonged impact of the Iran war on consumption, imports and freight transit in the Gulf region.Executives, analysts and brokerage firms estimate a loss of $2 billion-3 billion on India’s electronics exports, largely because electronics manufacturing services (EMS) companies export a sizeable quantity of mobile phones to the Gulf area—a key trade and consumption hub.Mobile phones are among the top five most-impacted commodities as a result of the Gulf nations and the West Asia region being directly affected in Israel and the US’s war on Iran, analysts Suvodeep Rakshit and Swarupjit Palit at brokerage firm Kotak Institutional Equities wrote in a note to investors on 6 March.The analysts cited India’s commerce ministry data to say that mobile phone exports to the Gulf and West Asia rose to $3.1 billion in FY25, accounting for 12% of the country’s net electronics exports. This entire chunk may be affected and EMS companies that rely significantly on mobile phone manufacturing may be substantially hit, at least in the current quarter and next.If the conflict continues, the entire $3 billion in export value may be wiped off in the next fiscal year, the Kotak analysts said.

A sudden surge in demand for induction cooktops, triggered by India’s curbs on LPG supplies, has prompted kitchen appliance makers to ramp up production, testing supply chains for imported components.Demand for induction cooktops spiked after the government imposed restrictions on booking LPG cylinders and increased their prices, pushing restaurants and households in urban areas to look for electric cooking alternatives.At Stovekraft Ltd, the parent company of kitchen appliance brands Pigeon and Gilma, average sales of induction cooktops increased about four times over the past few days, with weekly demand about five-fold higher than in the same period last year, managing director Rajendra Gandhi told Mint.“Induction cooktops are currently seeing the strongest demand, followed by cookware,” Gandhi said. Demand is largely from retail consumers through online channels, with some traction from restaurants and cloud kitchens, he said.Wonderchef Home Appliances Pvt Ltd founder and CEO Ravi Saxena said the company’s monthly inventory of induction cooktops sold out within hours after demand suddenly spiked.“Whatever we sell in a month has already been consumed in less than half a day,” Saxena said.

It is welcome that India is liberalizing inward investment from countries that share a land border with India. Investments up to 10% of a company’s paid-up capital that involve no board-seat control will be allowed under the automatic route. Investment proposals that need government approval would also be fast-tracked for nods within 60 days in specified sectors, including the manufacture of capital goods, capital goods for electronics, electronic components, polysilicon and the conversion of polysilicon into ingots and their slicing into wafers.

New Delhi: India’s automakers could be heading toward another semiconductor supply squeeze—this time triggered by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. As chipmakers shift manufacturing capacity toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI data centres, supplies of conventional memory chips used in vehicles are tightening, driving up prices and raising supply risks for the industry.This could mark the third major supply disruption for the auto industry in recent years, after the rare earth magnet crunch triggered by China’s restrictions last year, and the global semiconductor shortage during the covid pandemic years of 2020-22.At least two industry executives said that if supply pressures persist, automakers may start facing shortages by the end of the next financial year (FY27).“Internal estimates suggest that the supply crunch will get serious towards the last two quarters of the next financial year, which is why there is a rush to prepare now,” one of the executives mentioned above said on the condition of anonymity.The issue was earlier flagged to analysts by Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd (M&M), which makes electric cars, and e-two-wheeler manufacturer Ather Energy Ltd.“Memory chips are something that is a supply chain risk/price sensitive thing because shortage obviously is driving premiums in memory chips,” M&M executive director Rajesh Jejurikar told analysts and investors on an 11 February earnings call.

As the dust settles on India’s recent AI summit—optimistic in tone, ambitious in scope—a harder question demands an honest answer. What does the next wave of artificial intelligence mean for a sector that has served as a key economic engine for three decades? Information technology (IT) services generate over $254 billion in annual exports, employ 5.4 million professionals and finance a merchandise trade deficit that has breached $300 billion. Software exports are a success story.

New Delhi: For the first time, nearly a third of all laptops being sold in India are being shipped with the ‘Made in India’ tag. This rise, which has played out over the past two years, has happened as government incentives have pushed electronics manufacturers to focus on the segment and diversify from mobile-led revenue.In March 2024, less than 5% of all laptops being sold in India were being assembled locally, analysts and industry executives said.

Mint.Saraswat also said that specific features and the incentive structure under the second phase of the India Semiconductor Mission announced in Union budget 2026 are being worked out.Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the second phase of the mission in her budget speech in February to scale up the country’s capabilities in equipment, materials, design, intellectual property rights and to fortify the supply chain. In the budget for 2026-27, the Centre announced a second tranche of incentives under the mission, five years after rolling out the first ₹76,000-crore programme.India will also strive to explore and produce select critical minerals found domestically despite their low resource intensity making them costlier to extract, to guard against the risk of supply denial by other countries in future, Saraswat said.India’s push to build domestic capabilities in semiconductors and critical minerals, which are vital for IT, clean energy and defence sectors, comes at a time technology is increasingly shaping industrial and military power in a de-globalising world with weakening adherence to the rule of law.

Russian oil imports have received a free pass for a month, markets are spooked. And reasonably so.Higher crude means higher landed inflation, a wider current account deficit, and pressure on the rupee – all headwinds for corporate earnings, which had only just started staging a recovery. And markets have reacted accordingly – Nifty 50 index dropped almost 3% last week, matching the declines seen in the midcap and smallcap spaces.However, markets are never one-dimensional.

Lenskart, are also entering the fray with smart glasses aimed at real-time translation and contextual assistance.The logic is simple: if traditional smartwatches have become commoditized health trackers, AI-powered wearables could revive demand by becoming what founders describe as a “second brain”, devices that remember conversations, assist with speech, translate in real time and even complete tasks through voice commands.“AI-first wearables have the potential to revive a slowing category by transforming devices from passive trackers into intelligent companions that deliver real time health insights, personalization, and secure authentication,” said Anshika Jain, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.Market projections reflect that optimism. The AI wearables segment in India generated $1.7 billion in revenue in 2023 and is projected to reach $12 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research.

India is preparing for one of the biggest overhauls of its highway tolling architecture since the rollout of FASTag. Instead of the previously considered Global Navigation Satellite System-based tolling model, the ministry of road transport and highways and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) now plan to implement the Multi-Lane Free-Flow electronic toll collection system across the country’s 146,560-km national highway network.

Stock market recap: Indian equities witnessed a significant sell-off on Monday, 2 March, as escalating geopolitical tensions in West Asia triggered a global "risk-off" sentiment. The Nifty 50 plummeted 312.95 points (1.24%) to settle at 24,865.70, while Sensex shed 1,048.34 points (1.29%) to close at 80,238.85 in a volatile session. India VIX, or the fear gauge, surged more than 20% to cross the 17 level.

The new Income Tax rules have proposed a change for claiming house rent allowance (HRA) that may affect claims where the rent is paid to parents, siblings or any other relative. Effective 1 April, salaried employees may have to clearly state their relationship with their landlord while claiming HRA tax benefits.The aim is to prevent misuse of the exemption, especially in cases where rent is shown to be paid to family members to reduce tax liability, said Sandeepp Jhunjhunwala, partner at Nangia Global Advisors.

Jewar: HCL Group, the parent firm of India’s third-largest tech services company HCLTech, aims to supply chips for a quarter of all of India’s displays within as soon as two years, chairperson of the group Roshni Nadar-Malhotra said on Saturday.The top executive, who also happens to be the only woman at the helm of one of India’s six large-cap IT services firms, was speaking at the inauguration of the company’s joint-venture chip assembly plant for displays in Jewar, Uttar Pradesh.“It’s too early to discuss client names, but there is ample demand, and India has a huge market. We’ll roll out the first commercial display chip from our plant in 2028, and look to scale up to our peak capacity of 36 million chips per month very soon.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Drones are revolutionising logistics, swiftly moving everything from medical supplies to diagnostic samples across challenging terrain. Leading Indian drone companies have been at the forefront of this shift, adapting their technology to navigate the country's complex geography and climate.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Companies from Levi Strauss & Co. to McCormick & Co., among others, say they are raising prices early this year on items from bluejeans and spices to housewares and industrial products.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI: India’s AI Impact Summit 2026 is emerging as an early gauge of whether the country’s state-backed artificial intelligence (AI) startups can demonstrate meaningful progress in a rapidly shifting global AI landscape, as companies backed under the government’s India AI Mission prepare to showcase their models this week.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Starting Monday, India will host the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi with heads of state, global tech leaders and policymakers in attendance. Just days earlier, the ministry of electronics and information technology had notified a legal framework to govern synthetically generated or AI-driven content.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI : The electronics sector has emerged as India's second-largest export segment after petroleum products, but sustaining this momentum will require a shift from assembly-led growth to deeper component manufacturing and a stronger integration into global value chains for higher value goods, Niti Aayog said in the sixth edition of its Trade Watch Quarterly (Q2 FY26) on Friday.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Shares of LG Electronics India Ltd (LGE India) traded around 3% higher on Friday, recovering losses from the previous session following weak December-quarter (Q3FY26) performance, where both revenue and profit fell short of expectations. Investors appear to be taking a longer-term view, encouraged by management’s relatively upbeat outlook.