Samsung to finally get its FY21 incentives under PLI scheme
Samsung for the first year — FY21 — of the smartphone production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, officials told ET.
The approval, granted after over two years, came after the smartphone major revised its claims as the government had found some discrepancies in the original paperwork.
«The claims for the first year have been approved and the amount is likely to be disbursed in a couple of weeks,» an official said.
The approved amount though is nearly half of the ₹900 crore that Samsung had initially filed for in August 2021, claiming to have achieved the target of ₹15,000 crore worth of incremental sales for FY21.
To claim the subsidy, Samsung had to produce handsets with a factory cost of more than $200 (roughly ₹15,000). However, the ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity) found some discrepancies in the company's invoices and held back the incentives.
While Samsung was the only company to have achieved the production targets in the first year of the PLI scheme, it is the last one to get the incentives due to the discrepancies and subsequent checks.
Other global beneficiaries of the PLI scheme, the three contract manufacturers of Apple — Wistron, Pegatron and Foxconn — got the benefits for the first year long back.
Officials said that Samsung was in the process of filing claims for the third year of the PLI scheme, or FY23, after failing to achieve the targets in the second year, FY22. A query sent to Samsung remained unanswered at the time of going to press.
The smartphone PLI scheme offers graded incentives in the form of cashbacks at 6% of incremental sales of goods for each of the first two years, 5% for the third and fourth years, and 4% for the fifth year.
The overall financial outlay for
