Foxconn’s change of heart on chips is a warning to India

India has grand plans to become an electronics manufacturing hub. Given that level of ambition, we need to be prepared for setbacks — such as the news this week that Taiwan-based Foxconn would not, in the end, build a semiconductor factory in the western Indian state of Gujarat.

This was a huge disappointment. Getting some semiconductor fabrication to happen onshore was a crucial part of India’s plans to create a homegrown, end-to-end electronics manufacturing supply chain. Those plans, it turns out, may have been both too ambitious and not ambitious enough.