Industry

Make in India electronics: what "assembled in India" actually means

The label can mean five different things depending on who is using it. Here is a practical decoder for buyers and procurement teams.

The spectrum

On one end is full vertical manufacture - silicon wafers fabbed in India, packaged in India, assembled in India. On the other end is rebadging - finished foreign product imported, given a new sticker, called "Made in India". Most of the catalogue you see today sits somewhere in the middle.

Where memory and storage typically land

For memory and storage, the silicon (DRAM dies, NAND flash) is fabbed by a small number of global foundries. The PCB, the SMT placement, the programming, the testing, the QA, the packaging, the dispatch - all of that can and does happen domestically. ZION operates at this level: we do not fab silicon, we do everything from board to box-out in India.

Why the distinction matters for procurement

Different layers of the Public Procurement Policy give different levels of preference depending on the local content claimed. A buyer claiming "domestic" needs to know whether the supplier is at the assembly layer, the SMT layer, or just the packaging layer. The deeper the local value addition, the cleaner the procurement story.

How to verify a claim

Ask the supplier for (1) a factory address you can visit, (2) photos of the line under operation, (3) MES records as evidence of in-country traceability, (4) a Local Content declaration if you're procuring under PPP-MII. Most genuine domestic manufacturers will hand all four over without hesitation.

Keep reading
Memory basicsDDR4 vs DDR5: when is it worth upgrading?Buying guideHow to check if your RAM is originalStorage basicsSATA, NVMe Gen 3, NVMe Gen 4: which SSD do you actually need?