India Delays Import Restrictions On Laptops And PCs

The Indian government has decided to push the timeline for restricting laptop and PC imports on Friday. According to Rajeev Chandrashekar, Union Minister of Electronics and Technology, the companies will get a transition period for the importing license to come into effect. He doesn’t give a timeline, and mentions that will be notified soon.

This move comes less than 24 hours after the Ministry announced that all importing of PCs, laptops and tablets have now been restricted. The reason behind this move was to encourage local manufacturing and reduce dependence on imports from countries like China and Vietnam in the PC sector.

In an earlier post, Chandrashekar explains the reasoning behind the restricting PC imports. He claims the government’s objective is to ensure trusted hardware and systems and made available in the country, and like we mentioned, reduce the dependence on imports and look to increase domestic manufacturing of products in these categories.

The decision to restrict imports raised a lot of questions, and definitely caused some kind of panic in the industry this week. But the fact that the rollout has been deferred for now, should give companies like Apple, Asus, HP and more the time to implement the changes and seek the import license that will allow them to do business in the regular manner. The decision also brings relief to the consumers who would have feared the impact of the restriction, which could have limited their access to the latest products, and also invariably impacted on the price of these categories as well.