MSI opens its first laptop manufacturing facility in India — MSI bets big on India’s explosive projected demand for high-performance laptop devices

MSI has opened up laptop manufacturing operations in India to meet increasing market demand. DigiTimes Asia reports that MSI is introducing two entirely local models to India that will not be sold anywhere else, the Modern 14 and Thin 15.

MSI announced its first facility will be built in Chennai, where the India-exclusive Modern 14 and Thin 15 will be built. In conjunction with its production facilities, MSI purportedly collaborates with local retailers such as Croma and Reliance Retail to help distribute its products nationwide and introduce its brand-specific notebook stores.

The two notebooks are mid-range focused products; the Thin 15 will start at approximately $623.82, and the Modern 14 will be priced at roughly $871.04. Specs were not shared, but both laptop designs are inevitably based on MSI’s outgoing iterations of the Thin and Modern series. The Thin series is a gaming-focused lineup of MSI laptops prioritizing a slim 15.6 form factor (as the name suggests) with models such as the B13VX advertised with a 21.7mm thin chassis. The Modern 14 series is a non-gaming, prosumer/productivity-oriented laptop MSI laptop lineup featuring a smaller 14-inch form factor. Again, it remains to be seen what specs the new India-specific models will have, but MSI will likely update them with Intel, AMD, and/or Nvidia’s latest hardware. Outgoing iterations of the Thin and Modern 14 series iterations use previous-generation hardware, mostly sporting RTX 30 series GPUs and 12th-generation Core mobile processors.

India is experiencing a rapid surge in high-performance laptop demand, which is the sole reason for MSI’s big push into the Indian market. John Hung, the general manager of laptops at MSI India, purportedly stated that the rising demand for high-performance notebooks was crucial in the decision to build a local manufacturing plant in India.

As a result, we can expect MSI to have a massive presence in the Indian laptop market from here on out. Expert Market Research reports that India’s laptop market size is expected to almost double in value from 2023 to 2032, reaching a value of $10.02 billion by 2032 (compared to $6.82 billion in 2023). A large part of this is India’s significantly declining PC market share (30.01% decline in March 2023, which is being replaced with 2-in-1 and vanilla laptop demand. This change is purportedly a result of governmental digitalization efforts combined with the rising adoption of remote work and work-from-home culture in the country.