Will India-Made laptops come under the Chromebook badge soon?

India-made Chromebook laptops will enable HP to circumvent any potential import restrictions, marking a triumph for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s $2 billion initiative to attract tech giants to manufacture in India. The Chromebooks will be produced at HP’s facility near Chennai, where the company has been manufacturing laptops and desktops since 2020. Following the introduction and subsequent delay of licensing requirements on laptop and PC imports, major players such as Asus, Dell, HP, and Foxconn have joined India’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, indicating an increase in Indian-made laptops and PCs in the near future. HP’s partnership with Google to manufacture Chromebooks aligns with their mission to support India’s digital education ecosystem by providing affordable and secure computing devices to schools and institutions. With local manufacturing, HP will be able to avoid potential import restrictions on Chromebooks. The production of Chromebooks is set to begin on October 2, 2023. The rise in technological production in India is evident, with Apple planning to expand its production in the country by over fivefold in the next four to five years and the export industry for telecommunications equipment, including smartphones, growing rapidly. Prime Minister Modi has called on global tech companies to establish a presence in India, and the country’s push for internal self-sufficiency has yielded positive results, including the production of two billion domestically assembled smartphones and feature phones between 2014 and 2022.