India’s largest electronics producer Dixon Technologies has joined hands with Taiwanese personal computer maker Acer to manufacture its laptops in India. The laptops will initially be manufactured for the domestic market and eventually for exports, according to a Business Standard report.

Dixon Technologies, founded by Sunil Vachani, will manufacture 5,00,000 Acer laptops annually at its plant, the report said quoting sources.

The development is being seen as a big win for the Centre’s ‘Make in India’ initiative as Dixon Technologies will benefit from the government’s Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme. In fact, Dixon Technologies was among the first few companies to be approved under the PLI scheme.

Meanwhile, Dixon is also setting up its 13th factory in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. The unit — with a capacity to produce 5 lakh laptops and 25 lakh tablets in a year — is expected to start production this year itself.

Earlier, in a conversation with Economic Times, Vachani had said that Dixon had set aside an investment of Rs 25 crore over four years, of which Rs 10 crore will be spent in the first year in the company’s new facility.

“We are estimating employment generation for 2,000 people by the second year,” he added.

In July this year, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had approved 10 domestic companies — Dixon Technologies, Lava, Infopower, Bhagwati, Neolync, Optiemus, Netweb, Smile Electronics, VVDN and Panache Digilife — under the scheme. Four global companies — Dell, ICT (Wistron), Flextronics, and Rising Stars Hi-Tech (Foxconn) — were also approved under the scheme.

Notified in March, the PLI scheme has an outlay of Rs 7,350 crore and stretches over a four-year period from April 2021 to March 2025. Under the scheme, domestic players that invest Rs 20 crore and achieve incremental sales of Rs 50 crore in the first year, Rs 100 crore in the second, Rs 200 crore in the third, and Rs 300 crore in the final year will pocket incentives of 1 percent to 4 percent on incremental sales over FY19-20, the base year.

(Edited by : Anilkumar Narayan)

First Published: Oct 08, 2021, 12:33 PMIST