Goyal closes a Japan trip pitching a $150 billion Indian chip market

Piyush Goyal ended a four-day visit to Japan on 27 August by asking Japanese firms to treat India as a manufacturing base for global demand, not only as a market. Semiconductors sat at the centre of the pitch. He told investors in Osaka that Indian chip consumption is projected to reach $150 billion a year by 2032.

The first India Semiconductor Mission put up $10 billion at the Centre. With state top-ups it pulled in about $20 billion of announced investment. Mission 2.0 adds a $15 billion outlay. Goyal said matching state incentives should lift that to about $50 billion of fresh capital. “We are ready to fund much more because we see the growing demand,” he said.

He described a six-part stack: chip design, machinery and materials, fabrication, ATMP and OSAT packaging, research, and training. Japanese companies at a semiconductor and AI roundtable talked about materials, equipment, power semiconductors, electronics, logistics and related work. Those are the layers where Japan still holds tools and process knowledge that India does not.

BIS exemptions and the 1,580 Suzukis

During the trip the government said it is preparing a route to exempt selected equipment and components from mandatory Bureau of Indian Standards certification. Semiconductor tools often sit in a queue at BIS while a fab schedule runs on a different clock. An exemption list is a practical concession to firms that already certify the same tools in Japan, Taiwan or the United States.

Goyal said India wants to take the number of Japanese companies in the country from about 1,500 toward a figure he framed as “1,580 companies like Suzuki.” The joke is also a target. Suzuki’s car plants are the template New Delhi keeps holding up: a full supplier park, local engineering, and exports back into the parent’s network.

He met Sumitomo Corporation, Meiji Seika Pharma and Mitsubishi Corporation, and held sector tables on capital goods, machinery, automotive, startups and foreign institutional investors. The delegation with him numbered more than 220 Indian industry representatives. 2026 is the official India-Japan Year of Shared Horizons, marking 75 years of diplomatic ties. During Modi’s 2025 visit the two governments set a target of ¥10 trillion in Japanese private investment in India over ten years. Goyal wrote afterwards that everything in the four days was “in service of that number.”

People as well as plants

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has signalled that Japan will take up to 300,000 Indian workers across sectors to ease labour shortages. Goyal asked Kansai firms to help train those workers in Japanese shop-floor practice and language before they leave. He also named food processing, shipbuilding, specialty chemicals, green hydrogen, medtech and agri-tech as fields where Japan’s standards and India’s scale can be paired.

On Substack he said the conversations were “not about factories alone.” He listed economic security, supply chains that survive the next rupture, defence-linked manufacturing, space, and robotics for ageing societies. That list is the current official vocabulary of the relationship. It is also a way of telling Japanese boards that a plant in India is a hedge against concentration in China, not only a cost play.

None of the public remarks announced a signed fab or a named materials plant. The deliverable from the week is a policy promise on BIS, a restated investment target, and a set of roundtables that Japanese firms can now staff. The test is whether Mission 2.0 money and the exemption list turn those meetings into purchase orders before the $150 billion demand figure arrives as imports rather than as output.