Why India’s electronics boom in BRICS comes with a concentration risk

As leaders of the expanded BRICS grouping gather in New Delhi this weekend, India’s electronics industry is arriving at the summit with a number that underlines both the opportunity and the challenge before the bloc: electronics exports to BRICS markets rose nearly 50 per cent in 2025-26.

India’s electronics exports to BRICS member countries increased 49.27 per cent in 2025-26, significantly faster than the country’s overall export growth of 26.53 per cent, according to data cited by the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC).

The acceleration comes at a time when India is trying to turn its BRICS chairmanship from a diplomatic exercise into a platform for deeper trade, investment and technology linkages. The 18th BRICS Summit, being held in New Delhi on September 12-13, is expected to focus heavily on trade, technology, digital cooperation, resilient supply chains and economic integration.

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For India’s electronics manufacturers, the question is whether the summit can help convert strong export momentum into a broader and more diversified market presence.

Concentration risk

The headline export growth is impressive, but the underlying trade pattern is more complicated.

The UAE and China together accounted for 88.5 per cent of India’s electronics exports to BRICS, according to ESC. Telecom equipment alone represented 74.6 per cent of electronics exports to the grouping.

The objective is not simply to sell more products to BRICS countries. It is to make it easier for Indian companies to become part of the production networks emerging across the grouping.

That concentration means India's export growth has so far been driven disproportionately by a small number of markets and products. It also highlights the difference between increasing exports to BRICS and achieving genuinely diversified integration with the bloc.

The UAE has emerged as India's largest BRICS export market, while China remains an important electronics trading partner. But China's role in India's wider trade relationship is heavily skewed towards imports. India imported $131.6 billion of goods from China in FY2025-26 while exporting $19.5 billion, leaving a bilateral deficit of $112.2 billion, according to an analysis of government trade data.

That imbalance is one of the economic realities New Delhi will have to navigate as it pushes for deeper intra-BRICS supply chains.

The bigger BRICS trade problem

Electronics may be one of India's faster-growing export segments, but India's overall trade relationship with BRICS remains considerably less balanced.

The 10 other BRICS members accounted for nearly 42 per cent of India's merchandise imports in FY2025-26, compared with around 22 per cent of exports. India's merchandise trade deficit with these countries was about $226.1 billion, according to trade data analysed by Business Standard.

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That makes the summit's economic agenda particularly important for India.

New Delhi is seeking greater access to BRICS markets, but it also wants to reduce the structural disadvantages that Indian companies face when entering those markets. Exporters have been pressing for simpler customs procedures, greater regulatory transparency, mutual recognition of standards, better logistics and more efficient cross-border payments.

In other words, the objective is not simply to sell more products to BRICS countries. It is to make it easier for Indian companies to become part of the production networks emerging across the grouping.

Trade forum to supply-chain network

That ambition is reflected in the economic initiatives being developed under India's BRICS chairmanship.

A proposed Global Value Chains Action Plan for 2026-2030 is intended to make supply chains across the grouping more resilient and productive while encouraging market opening and economic diversification. BRICS members have also moved towards cooperation on customs, standards and trade facilitation.

For electronics manufacturers, these seemingly technical measures can have significant commercial consequences.

A shipment can become uncompetitive because of certification requirements, customs delays, incompatible standards or difficulties in obtaining working capital just as easily as because of tariffs. Reducing those frictions could therefore be as important as negotiating lower duties.

This is particularly relevant to India's small and medium-sized electronics manufacturers, which often lack the financial and administrative capacity of large multinational companies to navigate multiple foreign regulatory systems.

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A proposed BRICS MSME cooperation portal and discussions around trade-finance mechanisms are aimed at addressing some of these constraints. At the BRICS Trade Ministers' meeting in Jaipur last month, members agreed on principles intended to improve MSME access to credit and global markets.

Digital export frontier

The electronics opportunity also intersects with one of the more ambitious parts of India's BRICS agenda: digital infrastructure.

India has proposed a BRICS Digital Public Infrastructure Repository, under which member countries could share knowledge and explore pilot projects involving digital public infrastructure. The initiative was presented at a BRICS ICT Track meeting in Pune last month.

The economic significance extends beyond government technology. If BRICS countries increasingly cooperate on digital identity, payments, connectivity, data infrastructure and interoperable systems, demand could emerge for the hardware, telecom equipment, cybersecurity capabilities and software required to build and operate those systems.

For Indian technology and electronics companies, that creates a potential export market that is broader than conventional shipments of finished devices.

India is also pushing for greater interoperability in cross-border payments. Reuters reported this week that New Delhi is advocating greater integration of central bank digital currencies among BRICS members to make cross-border transactions easier, although technical and geopolitical obstacles remain substantial.

The commercial logic is straightforward: cheaper, faster and more predictable payments can reduce one of the barriers that discourage smaller companies from entering unfamiliar markets.

Key caveat

But BRICS integration will not happen automatically. The economic opportunity comes with a significant caveat.

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BRICS has expanded rapidly and now includes 11 members with very different economic structures, regulatory systems and geopolitical priorities. The grouping represents about 49.5 per cent of the world's population, 40 per cent of global GDP and 26 per cent of global trade, according to the Indian government.

Yet its economic weight does not automatically translate into deep intra-group integration.

The members include major commodity exporters, manufacturing powers, energy producers and large consumer markets. Their trade interests often overlap, but they also compete with one another.

For India, the challenge is particularly visible in electronics. The country wants to expand exports and become a more important manufacturing hub, while simultaneously managing its dependence on imported components and finished goods from China.

That makes the idea of resilient BRICS value chains more complicated than simply connecting factories across borders.

India's exporters are therefore looking for a model that combines integration with diversification — using BRICS to access new markets and suppliers without creating new concentrations of economic dependence.

Policy challenge

The electronics export numbers give India a strong starting point, but the next phase will depend less on headline growth and more on whether companies can replicate it across a wider set of BRICS economies.

ESC's data suggests that there is considerable room to diversify beyond the UAE and China, particularly into markets such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa and other newer BRICS members.

The policy challenge is to turn the grouping's proposed mechanisms into practical commercial tools: faster customs clearance, compatible standards, digital trade documentation, easier access to export finance and reliable cross-border payments.

The BRICS economic agenda already contains many of these building blocks. The proposed 2030 economic partnership strategy, global value-chain action plan and MSME initiatives are intended to provide a longer-term framework for cooperation.

But implementation will determine whether they matter to exporters.

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For India's electronics industry, the New Delhi summit therefore arrives at an important inflexion point. The sector has demonstrated that it can grow rapidly in BRICS markets. The next test is whether India can turn that growth from a concentrated export story into a broader manufacturing and technology network spanning the world's expanding emerging-market bloc.

That would make the BRICS opportunity considerably larger than an export target. It would position the grouping as a potential part of India's strategy to build resilient global value chains — and make electronics one of the clearest tests of whether the economic ambitions of the New Delhi summit can translate into business at the factory floor.