The Map of the Boom: Which Indian States Actually Caught It

Three states account for more than half of India’s merchandise exports. The fastest-moving of them is where the electronics boom sits — and it now accounts for 41.63% of the category the country’s export story depends on.

The 89.82% jump in India’s electronic goods exports in August 2026 reads as a national statistic. It is closer to a state statistic. Our analysis of that jump treated it as a national event and asked whether the component plants now under construction would turn India from an assembler into a supplier. The sub-national data answers a prior question: where the boom actually is, and how few places it is in.

On the state-wise figures published with the government’s own trade data, Tamil Nadu accounted for 41.63% of India’s electronics exports in FY2025-26 — $19.97 billion of the national total, on the Commerce Ministry’s reply to a Lok Sabha question. Two years earlier that share was 32.84%.

The state that leads India’s exports is shrinking

Gujarat remains India’s largest exporter by a distance. It shipped $110.63 billion in FY2025-26, essentially a quarter of the $441.73 billion India exported that year. But it exported 4.91% less than the year before, and its share of national exports has fallen from 30.7% in FY2022 to around 25% now. Gujarat’s basket is petroleum products, gems and jewellery, chemicals and pharmaceuticals — the categories that carried Indian exports for two decades and that are now the flat part of the table.

Maharashtra, second, shipped $70.11 billion for a 15.87% share, up 6.37%. Tamil Nadu, third, shipped roughly $59 billion, up 13.67% — the fastest growth of any large exporting state. (Two official cuts of the same year differ marginally: $58.95 billion in the government’s answer to the Lok Sabha question, $59.31 billion on the Indian Trade Portal. The difference is rounding-level and does not touch the ranking.) Tamil Nadu’s share of India’s merchandise exports has risen from 8.5% in FY2022 to 13.7% in FY2026.

State	FY2025-26 exports	Share of national total	Change on FY2024-25
Gujarat	$110.63 billion	~25%	−4.91%
Maharashtra	$70.11 billion	15.87%	+6.37%
Tamil Nadu	$59.31 billion	13.43%	+13.67%
Karnataka	$34.4 billion	—	+12%

One quarter should not be over-read. Gujarat’s share is volatile, because refined petroleum is. In the first quarter of FY2026-27 alone, on the DGCI&S quarterly release, Gujarat was back up to 29.04% of exports, ahead of Maharashtra at 14.34%, Tamil Nadu at 12.72%, Karnataka at 7.71% and Uttar Pradesh at 4.85%. What is not volatile is the direction over five years.

The concentration inside the concentration

Tamil Nadu’s electronics exports went from $9.56 billion in FY2024 to $14.65 billion in FY2025 to $19.97 billion in FY2026 — an increase of 108.8% in two years. Its share of India’s electronics exports moved 32.84% → 38.00% → 41.63%, a gain of 8.79 percentage points.

The same state’s textiles and allied exports went $8.29 billion → $8.26 billion. Flat, in the same year that electronics in the same state added more than $5 billion.

That is the number worth sitting with. Tamil Nadu is not diversifying into electronics; its export basket is being rewritten by electronics, and what is being left behind is the labour-intensive half of it. The state that is winning the newest export category is losing ground in one of the oldest.

There is a small disagreement about the size of that share, and it is worth reporting rather than resolving. In February 2026 Tamil Nadu’s Industries Minister said the state had likely reached about 45% of India’s electronics exports in FY2026, and noted that the Centre was not releasing state-wise electronics data for the year. The figure from the official answer when the year closed is 41.63%. One is an in-year estimate, the other a settled number; the conservative figure is the one to carry, and the direction is the same either way.

Below the state, a district

The concentration goes one level lower than states. On official data for the first seven months of FY2025-26, the largest exporting district in India was Jamnagar in Gujarat, at $17.47 billion, almost all of it refined petroleum. Second was Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, at $10.36 billion — the district that contains the Sriperumbudur industrial belt, and the centre of India’s handset assembly industry.

The same dataset shows five states — Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh — shipping about $124 billion of the $254 billion India exported between April and October 2025. That is 48.8% of the country’s merchandise exports produced by five of its twenty-eight states.

What the map does not show

Sub-national trade data is weaker than it looks, and the weakness runs in a known direction. Exports are counted where the exporter files, not where the good is made, and many manufacturers in the interior invoice through offices near the coast. As Ajay Kadakia, chairman of the Mumbai trading house Vivil Exports, put it when this concentration was last reported: “A lot of chemical manufacturing units are exporting directly from Mangalore but 90-95% manufacturing units are still concentrated in Gujarat and Maharashtra.” The state table flatters the coastal states and understates inland production, which is part of why the quarterly figures move as much as they do.

And the state that fell hardest

The FY2026 state data holds a second surprise in the other direction. Telangana’s merchandise exports fell 27%, from $19.1 billion to $13.9 billion — the sharpest decline of any large exporting state, in a state whose export strength is pharmaceuticals and life sciences. Karnataka, at $34.4 billion, grew more than 12%, the second-fastest large-state growth and part of why India now has a second iPhone assembly cluster. And Uttar Pradesh, at 4.85% of exports in the latest quarter, is described in the same official data as an emerging electronics manufacturing hub — Noida’s handset cluster is the reason a state that was not on this table a decade ago now is.

Why the map changes the argument

NITI Aayog’s trade watchers put global electronics trade at roughly a $4.6 trillion market and note that India’s share of it, while rising, is still small. That is the opportunity. The risk side has been described as a boom resting on one product — 59.9% of India’s electronics exports are smartphones — sold into one market, with about 70% of handset value going to the United States.

The map adds two more layers to that: one state, and effectively one industrial belt inside it. Tamil Nadu’s 41.63% and Kanchipuram’s $10.36 billion are the same fact measured twice. A tariff decision in Washington, a component shortage in Shenzhen, a bad monsoon in Chennai — each lands on a national export line that is now substantially one district’s industrial estate.

None of this makes the electronics numbers wrong. It makes them specific. India’s fastest-growing export category is not a national achievement distributed across the country; it is a single manufacturing corridor whose output is counted in the national accounts. The policy question that follows is not whether to keep supporting it, but whether anything is being built to sit beside it — and on the FY2026 state data, the answer is a flat garment sector in the state that is winning, and four of the five largest exporting states growing slower than the country.

Pheonix Research covers the semiconductors and electronics sector — components, equipment, fabrication and end markets — including the Global Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment market, the equipment layer that captures value when fabs are actually built. The series continues with The Component Test.