The government revealed in a notification late on August 4 that the recently announced import restrictions on laptops, personal computers (PC), tablets, and other related devices have been postponed until October 31.
According to the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) statement, import consignments for restricted imports may be cleared without a license until October 31, 2023.
Until October 31, liberal transitional provisions are announced for the import of laptops, tablets, all-in-one PCs, servers, etc.
However, the DGFT stated that “as of November 1,” a valid license will be needed for limited imports.
After Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT, announced that a transition period would be in place before the distribution of the new regulations, the notification was made just hours later.
A day after the commerce ministry declared that computer makers will now need a valid license and would have to pay duty to import PCs, laptops, tablets, servers, etc., Chandrasekhar tweeted that “there will be a transition period for this to be put into effect, which will be notified soon.”
According to the commerce ministry, the exemption will only be granted on the import license for up to 20 of these items per consignment for product development, repair, re-export, and research and development purposes.
This has nothing to do with license raj, Chandrasekar insisted. He made his statement immediately after news broke that major companies, including Apple, Samsung Electronics, and HP Inc., were stopping new laptop and tablet imports to India in response to the restrictions.
According to experts who spoke with Moneycontrol, price increases may occur soon, even though the ‘Make in India’ effort will benefit long-term from the strategy.
“There may be a short-term price hike by businesses for specific products, such as Apple, whose products are entirely imported. However, since Dell and HP already have manufacturing facilities here, this might work well for them, according to Neil Shah, a partner at Counterpoint Research.
The industry and industry observers shouldn’t be surprised by this, according to Navkendar Singh, Associate Vice President, Devices Research at IDC, as it was inevitable that this would occur at some point. The majority of them are assembling a large number of computers here, despite the government having long advised the sector to begin manufacturing in India, he claimed.
Nearly 1.5 million of the 2 million computers that India exports each quarter are imported. Each high-end laptop is imported. Huge volumes are involved, and an imbalance between imports and exports exists. However, at this time, we must wait to increase manufacturing, he continued.
