Murali Srinivasa, CEO and founder of Lion Circuits, says India can compete with China in PCB manufacturing, and that significant change will be visible in four to five years. He also explained what stands in the way.
About the event
This conversation was recorded at electronica India and productronica India 2026, South Asia's leading trade fair for the electronics industry. Held September 16-18 at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre in Bengaluru and organized by Messe Muenchen India, the show covered the complete electronics value chain. It brought together 793 exhibitors and over 52,000 business visitors under the theme "India's Powerplay in Electronics."
How Lion Circuits Started
Lion Circuits began about ten years ago, when Murali moved back to India after working for Texas Instruments in the Bay Area. It started as an experiment: a factory floor efficiency technology company that used new technologies to solve problems on manufacturing floors.
The first three years went into board fabrication, followed by a couple of years on PCB assembly. For the first five years, the team worked closely with manufacturing partners on their shop floors, without owning a factory. Along the way, he said, they recognised a deep structural gap: all of India’s electronics and bare board manufacturing facilities combined are tiny compared with a single Chinese factory. That gap led Lion Circuits to start vertical integration.
From Gerber File to Finished Board
Once a Gerber file is uploaded, most of the CAM engineering is automated. A standard order, such as a two-layer board with green solder mask, goes through automated checks and, if they all pass, reaches the factory floor with no manual touch. A DFM exception triggers a manual review.
A two-layer board goes through roughly 20 to 25 machines, covering drilling, plating, imaging, etching, solder mask, legend printing, surface finish, flying probe testing, profiling, inspection and packing. A multilayer board adds another four to five machines. For multilayer boards the inner layers are done first, and the process takes roughly a day or two longer depending on the layer count. Beyond eight layers, layer-to-layer registration and some additional processes need extra care.
Capacity Versus Capability
Murali separated capacity, meaning how much a factory can produce, from capability, meaning what it can produce. On capacity, he said the largest factory in India can produce about 15,000 to 20,000 square meters of two-layer boards a month, which is small next to a large Chinese factory.
On capability, the hardest areas right now are high layer count and HDI. For high layer count, he said, it comes down to how accurately the layers are registered and how well the vacuum hot press performs.
He said capacity and capability both matter, but two, four and six-layer boards hold the largest market share, with two-layer boards taking the lion’s share. Lion Circuits started its pilot fab with two, four and six layers and has reached 16 layers in-house. The company is now building a 100-acre campus in Vijayapura through a new company, Terra Circuits, which he said was started solely to build and expand factories. Phase one will greatly increase the capacity of its current pilot fab while keeping the same capabilities, and will include a pilot fab targeting HDI.
Quality and Process Control
Murali said Indian two, four and six-layer quality is much better than it was four or five years ago, and that manufacturers are improving every year. China went through the same cycle over 15 to 20 years, he said. He recalled ordering boards from China in 2008 or 2009 and finding them unusable.
The real challenge is process control at scale. Doing something once is easy, he said, but doing it across thousands of panels a day means every condition must stay the same, including the ambient conditions of the room. Chinese factories learned over time what to control, and Indian manufacturers know these problems too. He agreed that this is an important operational learning curve and said he is bullish that Indian companies that have survived the last 20 to 30 years will accelerate faster than any joint venture.
Raw Materials and Machines
The main inputs are copper-clad laminates, specialty chemicals, ultra-pure metals and clean water. Murali said nearly everything is imported, a challenge China also faced earlier. There are some early moves toward local sourcing: Lion Circuits now buys all its drill bits from an Indian supplier, and it is running trials with an Indian solder mask ink maker and working with a specialty chemicals company. He said some listed companies are close to starting copper-clad laminate plants, and Lion Circuits has reserved space on its Vijayapura campus for one in the future.
He said there is currently no technology block on buying machines from China. The difference is delivery time: a machine can arrive in about a week in China, but for an Indian company it takes about three months, or six weeks at best. He tied China’s reliability to its whole ecosystem of suppliers and machine makers, not just its factories.
Building a Domestic Supplier Base
Asked whether Indian raw material makers would have enough local demand, Murali agreed it is a real concern, and said people who approached Lion Circuits about starting such businesses raised it themselves. He said Lion Circuits is open to helping: new Indian suppliers can use its lines for trial runs and qualification, and the new campus is being built with parallel lines so there is always an extra line for R&D. He urged other manufacturers to open up to Indian suppliers and keep a small extra line for trials. Replacing an imported material with a local one is risky and needs trial runs, he said, and gave plating as an example, calling it the heart of the PCB.
On machines, he said Chinese equipment makers were poor ten years ago but improved through years of iteration, and that Indian CNC machine makers took 20 to 30 years to reach their current level. India needs more companies building PCB equipment, he said, and he suggested the Chinese model of specialists making components that system integrators assemble into branded machines.
Advantages and Outlook
India’s biggest advantage, he said, is its large domestic market, with so many PCBs still imported from China by industries such as automotive. He also said AI tools have helped Lion Circuits build advanced schedulers for its factory floor and have made software work easier.
Asked whether India can compete with China, Murali said yes. He expects good traction in the next couple of years and a significant impact in four to five years. He acknowledged that even the fully built campus will be a fraction of what China produces, but said Lion Circuits has much bigger plans in this direction. He thanked all stakeholders, including the government, for enabling this.
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