When a market is about to triple in a decade, the patent filing map you drew for yesterday’s demand is the one that will let you down. A McKinsey analysis, written with the Indian Electrical and Electronics Manufacturers Association, puts numbers on the shift: India’s electrical-equipment production is projected to rise from roughly US$50 billion to more than US$195 billion by 2035, with the fastest growth in power electronics, batteries and grid management.
The IP signal sits in the remedy. Sector R&D runs at less than half a per cent of revenue, against 1.5 to 2.0 per cent in China, so the report advises companies to “forge global technology alliances” in order to “access frontier intellectual property”, and to pursue “targeted cross-border M&A and strategic investments in niche technologies”. That is a technology licensing market forming in public. If you hold patents in silicon carbide devices, cell chemistry, thin-film photovoltaics or high-voltage cable processing, a new class of licensees and acquirers is being told to come and find you. If you are the one scaling, you are being told to buy a position you do not own.
The durable lesson is in the title. Capacity is not a competitive position. Five times the plant, built on technology someone else owns, buys volume at someone else’s margin, and it fixes a royalty negotiated from the weakest possible seat, because leverage moves to the licensor the moment your capital is committed. Three disciplines follow, and none of them are specific to India:
– Price the in-licence before you commit the plant, not after.
– Match your patent filing strategy to the ten-year demand map rather than the historical sales map. A patent only works where it is in force, and import substitution is a plan to manufacture your technology somewhere you may never have filed.
– Treat the acquisition of niche technology as an IP due diligence question first and a manufacturing question second. What you are buying is a set of rights, encumbrances and freedom-to-operate assumptions, not a production line.
Export ambition raises the same question again. Certification, standards and testing are the gate to European and North American tenders, and that gate is where standard-essential patents and licensing obligations sit waiting. So the useful question for your next board paper is not how much capacity you are adding. It is whether the build, licence or acquire decision was taken before the capex was approved, or after.
Read the article: Wired for growth: India’s electrical-equipment opportunity, McKinsey and IEEMA, 21 May 2026.