India entered commercial semiconductor packaging production, with an operation in Gujarat run by a joint venture between local and foreign companies.
Packaging is the stage where a finished die receives the housing and connections that allow installation. It's treated as the least glamorous part of the chain, and it was exactly the bottleneck of the period, with about a billion dollars of phone silicon awaiting that step.
A new country entering that stage matters because packaging is labour-intensive and less dependent on leading-edge lithography equipment, which lowers the barrier to entry relative to fabricating the die.
For the global chain, more packaging capacity means less chance of repeating the situation where the die exists and the finished product doesn't ship.
It's a useful reminder that bottlenecks rarely sit where attention does: the whole month discussed memory and accelerator scarcity while the queue formed at assembly.