For much of the past three decades, Asia’s electronics industry has been organized around a simple premise: Demand was external, scale was the advantage and speed was the differentiator. Component makers that mastered this formula dominated global markets.
That premise is now being quietly tested, not by a new export hub, but by India’s domestic electronics demand.
India’s electronics growth is not being driven primarily by exports, contract manufacturing relocation or global brand migration alone. It is also being pulled by a set of domestic demand engines that behave very differently from the export markets Asian suppliers are accustomed to serving.
Quietly, and without fanfare, these engines are forcing a rethink of how suppliers engage, invest and collaborate.
From market entry to demand pullFor years, India was framed as an emerging opportunity, a market to be entered and patiently developed. That framing is increasingly outdated.
India today is generating its own electronics demand across multiple sectors simultaneously, including energy infrastructure, automotive and electric mobility, appliances, industrial automation and smart metering. These segments are becoming primary drivers of electronics consumption, shaping requirements from the ground up.
Unlike export-led demand, these markets are not price-led alone. They are shaped by lifecycle responsibility, field reliability, regulatory exposure and long-term service obligations.
In infrastructure segments such as smart metering, for example, suppliers often remain accountable for performance over close to a decade, reflecting utility procurement models that embed long warranty periods, service-level obligations and regulatory scrutiny into deployment contracts.
This shifts supplier evaluation away from initial cost and early delivery toward long-term reliability, field performance and the ability to sustain support over operating lifecycles.
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India demand sourcesIndia is one of the world’s largest automotive markets by unit volume, with annual production and sales across passenger vehicles, two-wheelers, three-wheelers, and commercial vehicles running into the tens of millions of units.
It is already the world’s largest two-wheeler market, and electric mobility is expanding rapidly within this base. This breadth is creating sustained demand for power electronics, motor control, lighting, sensing, and embedded control systems, increasingly designed, validated and supported locally.
In infrastructure electronics, national smart metering programmes have moved well beyond pilot phases into mass deployment and rollout of tens of millions of smart meters over multiple years, driving long-cycle demand for communication modules, power management, security components, and system-level integration.
Few markets outside of China are deploying smart meters at comparable scale, making India structurally important rather than opportunistic.
Solar and energy-transition initiatives add another layer of electronics demand. India is now among the world’s leading solar installation markets, with cumulative capacity already measured in many tens of gigawatts and steady annual additions continuing. This has created sustained demand for inverters, monitoring electronics, grid-interface systems, and energy-management solutions.
What links these segments is not just volume, but domestic accountability. Products are deployed locally, maintained locally, and judged by long-term field performance. This reality reshapes how suppliers are evaluated, and why commitment builds more slowly, but more durably.
Parallel sourcing; delayed commitmentIn India’s demand-led electronics segments, customers deliberately separate execution from commitment. Multiple suppliers are run in parallel. Qualification cycles often extend over years rather than quarters.
Decisions are distributed across engineering, manufacturing, sourcing, and field teams. From a component supplier’s perspective, progress can feel ambiguous even when programmes are advancing exactly as intended.
This structure is intentional rather than incidental. In infrastructure-linked and reliability-critical applications, early single-supplier dependency is actively avoided. Designs are structured to accommodate alternates, and suppliers are benchmarked over extended periods under comparable operating conditions.
What may appear inefficient through an export-market lens is, in practice, a rational response to long lifecycles, warranty exposure, and field-performance risk in domestic deployments.
Changing supplier economicsThe shift from export demand to domestic demand alters supplier economics in subtle but important ways.
In export markets, speed to scale is often rewarded. In India’s domestic markets, staying power matters more. Suppliers are observed not only when volumes rise, but when forecasts soften, specifications evolve, or approvals slow. Behaviour during uncertainty carries as much weight as performance during growth.
This explains why some suppliers with modest initial volumes eventually become deeply embedded, while others with impressive shipment numbers remain interchangeable. Commitment is inferred from consistency, not acceleration.
In India’s demand-led segments, long-term intent is assessed through day-to-day engagement during design, validation, and early field learning, rather than early shipment scale alone.
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In areas such as motor control for electric mobility, appliances and industrial systems, customers increasingly assess not just component performance, but how suppliers support tuning, adaptation and problem-solving across real design cycles.
This reinforces why patience and application support, rather than early shipment scale alone, shape which suppliers become embedded over time.
What Asia must relearnIndia’s new demand engines represent one of the most consequential growth opportunities Asian electronics firms will encounter this decade. But they are forcing suppliers to relearn capabilities that were deprioritised during the export boom.
Patience. Application support. Long-cycle engagement. Collaboration without immediate payoff. Continuity of account stewardship. Comfort with ambiguity.
These are not new skills. They are simply ones that matter again. India is not trying to rewrite Asia’s electronics playbook. It is simply operating under a different demand structure.
Yet the effect is the same. Engagement models optimized for export markets are being stress-tested by a domestic, reliability-driven ecosystem. Suppliers who adapt quietly are finding durable positions.
Those who wait for familiar signals often remain on the periphery. As India’s demand engines continue to expand, they will shape how Asia’s suppliers design, qualify and commit for years to come.
The rewrite is already happening – it is just not being announced.
R.D. Pai is a Singapore-based industry adviser and founder of Focalpoint Consultants, with more than three decades of experience across India and Asia’s electronics and semiconductor ecosystem.
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