Govt stays implementation of laptop, PC import curbs till October 31

The policy to impose import curbs was announced by Union commerce ministry on August 3

Implementation of the Union commerce ministry's recently announced curbs on the import of laptops, personal computers (PC), tablets and other related items has been stayed till October 31, the government said in a notification issued late on August 4.

"Import consignments can be cleared till October 31, 2023 without a licence for restricted imports," the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) stated in the notification.

Liberal transitional arrangements are notified for the import of laptops, tablets, all-in-one personal computers, servers etc till October 31, it added.

The DGFT, however, noted that a valid licence for restricted imports will be required "with effect from November 1".

The notification came hours after Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT, said a transition period would be in place before the rollout of the new norms.

"There will be a transition period for this to be put into effect which will be notified soon," Chandrasekhar had tweeted, a day after the commerce ministry announced that computer manufacturers will now require a valid licence and would have to pay duty to import PCs, laptops, tablets, servers etc.

The exemption will be provided on the import licence only for up to 20 of such items per consignment for the purpose of research and development, testing, benchmarking and evaluation, repair and re-export and for product development, the commerce ministry had stated.

Chandrasekhar defended the policy, claiming that the government's objectives are to ensure that "trusted hardware and systems" are used in the Indian tech ecosystem, "to reduce import dependence" and to "increase domestic manufacturing of this category of products".

"This is not at all about licence raj," Chandrasekar stressed. His statement came shortly after reports said that Apple, Samsung Electronics and HP Inc are among the big names that are freezing new imports of laptops and tablets to India in response to the curbs.

Experts who spoke to Moneycontrol, said there could be near-term price hikes even as the policy would boost the 'Make in India' initiative in the long run.

"There could be some price increase by enterprises in the short term for some of the products like by Apple whose products are 100 percent imported. But for Dell and HP, this could play up well as they already have manufacturing set-up here," Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, said.

According to IDC's Associate Vice President, Devices Research, Navkendar Singh, this should not be a surprise to the industry and the industry observers as this was bound to happen at one point. The government has been telling the industry to start manufacturing in India for a long time and the majority of them are assembling a lot of desktops here, he said.

“India ships around 2 million laptops a quarter, and out of that, almost 1.5 million are imported. Every premium laptop is imported. The volumes are huge, there is also an import-export imbalance here. But currently, we don’t have the capacity to actually expand manufacturing immediately,” he added.