How the smartphone boom shows up in India’s trade data

As we wrote last month, the electronics industry is one of India's success stories. CEIC has added more detailed trade data for India, enabling our users to drill down for more granular information on a particularly notable export: smartphones.

To get a sense of the relationships in this value chain, our first chart visualizes India's smartphone exports against imports of chips -- a key "raw material" for manufacturers of Apple or Android devices.

We can see that both lines began their upward trend in 2018, when Samsung built the world's largest smartphone manufacturing facility in Uttar Pradesh.

The sector remains in its early stages, and much of the supply chain remains outside India's borders. Our second chart tracks imports of other key components, including batteries, and printed circuit boards. India is aiming to capture more of this value chain as the sector grows.

If you are a CEIC user, access the story here.