India needs indigenous raw material supply, more support for capital costs, R&D: Boeing India President Salil Gupte

At the Aero Show 2025, Boeing India President Salil Gupte sat down with DH’s Sonal Choudhary for an interaction, clarifying that Boeing India has delivered all 22 Apache helicopters to the Indian Air Force.

While Boeing is confident of its growth in India, supported by the military as well as burgeoning commercial demand, the company‘s India President Salil Gupte said that more needs to be done by India to increase its local manufacturing footprint.

At the Aero Show 2025, he sat down with DH’s Sonal Choudhary for an interaction, clarifying that Boeing India has delivered all 22 Apache helicopters to the Indian Air Force (as against certain news reports to the contrary). 

US is a huge defence supplier to India and Boeing has a lion’s share with Chinook, C17 transport planes among others. Going ahead, how do the prospects of growth look to you? 

The scale of manufacturing in civil aviation, combined with the technology development and co-development of defence aviation, is really the secret to growth and scaling up to be an aerospace hub and that's what we think we can achieve in India, and many of our conversations here have been about how to do that. 

We are also focusing on the operational readiness of the defence services and that’s also what we’re looking to grow at. There are many products going forward in the Indian defence ecosystem that will require design and development, which we have built up, while many of our competitors are just starting to do that. Hence, going ahead, this picture looks positive to me. 

Are you looking at increasing production in India, and how?

So, it's very much a national security imperative for India to increase its ‘Make in India’ elements. Even the first Trump administration, the Biden administration, and now the second Trump administration, wanted India to be a defence industrial partner of the US, both for India's own sake and for export, because they need strong partners. As a result of that, over the last 10-12 years, we have taken our sourcing in India from Rs 2,170 crore ($250 million) to Rs 10,855 crore ($1.25 billion). So, it's only natural that as the rate of sourcing increases, we will continue to grow.

Have the conditions eased for you to come and expand here in India? What challenges do you face?

Well, the government has certainly taken steps to make foreign direct investment (FDI) easier in terms of percentage of ownership in India, which is important and then also at the state level, we’ve seen the state governments across India being more aggressive in trying to bring in foreign original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

However, there are certain things that India needs to increase manufacturing in aerospace. One is raw materials capability, because many of the things that are manufactured in India, the raw materials are imported. If we can have more raw materials capability for 515 stainless steel, for aluminium, and for composites, that will help the Indian industry do more. 

Another would be that there needs to be incentive scheme to help Indian companies with the cost of capital-intensive aerospace production and research and development (R&D) because presently some Indian companies are setting up operations in the West as they have access to low-cost capital there, while the more labour-intensive is being done in India. 

The government can also look into providing a variant of production linked incentive (PLI) schemes to help offset that high capital cost to allow for more investment. 

Boeing has been looking to sell more Chinook helicopters to the Indian airforce and they are also looking to acquire more Apache helicopters. When can we expect all the deliveries and deals to be concluded? 

The 22 Apache helicopters were delivered to the Indian Air Force, with six more on order with the Indian Army. We are always in talks with our customers to support their current and future requirements.

What does the demand on the commercial side look like?

The civil aviation demand here has been like no market in the world over the last two years. It has been incredibly robust. I don't think any other country has placed as many orders as India over the last 24-30 months. In the last 24 months there were 446 orders while before that for us, there was actually quite a long pause. These orders came majorly from Air India and Akasa.