ICEA signs pact with CDAC to establish Centre of Excellence for Li-ion based products

India Cellular and Electronics Association (ICEA) has signed a pact with Noida’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) to establish a Centre of Excellence (COE) for Lithium-ion (Li-ion) based products. The COE is being set up in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity) and the Uttar Pradesh government. ICEA, whose members include companies like Apple, Wistron, Foxconn, and Xiaomi, signed pact with CDAC with the aim to enable Indian companies’ capture 30 percent of global market share in a decade. The Electronics and mobile devices industry body said that the move is a step in the direction to make the country self-reliant in the li-ion battery products segment.

The COE is expected to come up with infrastructure for testing, development SMES and entrepreneurs, consultancy-based services for design and testing, and designing export ready products. According to an official statement, COE, which has been set up to make India self-reliant in li-ion powered mobile add-on products, will contribute Rs 40,000-50,000 crore to the Indian economy by 2025. In this, more than 15 products, including Bluetooth, power banks, smart lighting systems and wearables, would be designed by the Research & Development team and industry participants, ICEA said in a statement.

National Policy on Electronics 2019 (NPE 2019) prioritizes the electronics hardware manufacturing sector as one of the key pillars of both the programs of the government – ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’. It has set the target of $190 billion for mobile handset manufacturing, of which, $110 billion will come by way of exports, ICEA noted. It added that, by 2025, total domestic consumption is projected to reach US $ 170-180 billion. Therefore, the balance of US $ 220-230 billion must be due to exports. ■