The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MEITY) has invited expressions of interest by companies who wish to set up a Display Fabrication Unit in India and the information sought will be used to formulate a scheme to suitably incentivise such companies.
“Displays account for over 25% of the BoM (bill of materials) in case of smartphones and over 50% in case of LCD / LED TVs,” the ministry said in a notification uploaded on its website.
It added that India’s display panel market is estimated to be $7 billion and is expected to grow to $15 billion by 2025 while current requirements are met exclusively through imports.
“As per estimates from ELCINA, the electronic components manufacturing sector suffers from a disability of around 10% due to the lack of adequate infrastructure, domestic supply chain and logistics; high cost of finance; inadequate availability of quality power; limited design capabilities and focus on R&D by the industry; and inadequacies in skill development,” it said.
Companies or consortia desirous of setting up LCD / OLED / AMOLED / QLED based Display Fabrication Unit in India must submit their expression by April 30, along with proposed location, land, water and power requirements etc.
Companies must also provide operational details including proposed panel manufacturing capacity/month, ramp-up timeline, and management structure and financial details including proposed investment, sources of funding and ownership structure, projected P&L Statement, and key financial indicators (IRR, ROI, ROCE, EBIDTA and NPV with and without expected government support), according to the notification.
According to industry estimates, a display fab requires a phased investment of $10 billion (or Rs 72,000 crore) over a period of 2-3 years.
India only has small display packaging units by vendors including Holitech, TXD, LCE and CSOT with a combined capacity of 13.90 million display units per month for smartphones and 11.4 million units for feature phones.
Whereas Samsung has recently made an investment of Rs 4,825 crores for assembling displays. But, there is no company that can manufacture displays from scratch.
