YES, even before India. This is a fact and most of us have forgotten it, or never knew it. In 2013 a company in Kathmandu called Motif Engineering was putting together smartphones under its own name, with its own logo on the back, and selling them at an expo in the capital with a discount sticker on the box. Micromax, the Indian brand everyone remembers from that time, did not open its own factory at Rudrapur until April 2014. Pakistan did not have a single serious assembly line until its 2020 policy. We had phones with a Nepali name on them a year before our bigger neighbour and seven years before the other one.
And then we had none. By 2021 the government’s own study on handset assembly could not point to one plant in the country. Today the top phone brand in Nepal is Apple, the second is Samsung, the third is Xiaomi, and the nearest thing to a Nepali phone company is a distributor.
So the question this post is asking is simple. We were first, what did we do with it.
This post was written in collaboration with 1xBet Nepal. I would like to say special thanks to their team for providing data and insights for this post.
Motif Engineering, Four Phones And The Prices
Motif was run by Surendra Manandhar as managing director, and it was described at the time as the first domestic company to assemble smartphones in Nepal. Not just import and rebrand, assemble, with engineers and application developers on the payroll. They designed four phones:
- Motif Ultimate, dual SIM, 3G plus GSM, WVGA screen, Rs 20,000
- Motif Ultimate Plus, same but more, Rs 22,000
- Motif Eyon, the cheap smartphone, Rs 8,000
- Motif Hero, a feature phone, for the uncle who did not want a touchscreen
Those prices should land with anyone who bought a phone in 2013. Twenty thousand rupees then bought you a mid-range Samsung Galaxy from an IMS shop, so Motif was asking Samsung money for a Nepali name on a Chinese-sourced board, and the pitch for doing that was in Manandhar’s own framing: an affordable quality phone that would reduce our dependence on low quality Chinese phones. That was the sales line at the ICT Electronics Branding Expo in 2013, where every Motif model carried 15 percent off until the Saturday.
A Nepali company was selling a Nepali-branded 3G smartphone at a trade show in Kathmandu in 2013. Read that line again if you are under 25, because nothing on the shelf today would make you guess it.
What Happened To It, As Far As We Could Find
We could not find out, and we tried. There is the expo coverage from 2013, the four models, the prices, and after that there is no record of Motif anywhere we could reach. No closing date, no sale, no later interview with Manandhar. The company website does not resolve any more. So if you bought a Motif Ultimate back then and it is still in a drawer in Lalitpur, that is the only surviving evidence of a Nepali phone brand and we would like a photo of it.
The reasons it did not last are still visible though, in who was selling what around it and in a tax table the government published much later.
Why Samsung’s Distributor Won And The Assembler Did Not
While Motif was assembling, IMS Group was importing, and had been for a long time:
- IMS has been Samsung’s national distributor in Nepal since 2001, twelve years before Motif’s expo
- It is run by Dikesh Malhotra, born in Kathmandu in 1987, who took the business his father Deepak built and grew it to fifteen companies, IMS Telecom among them
- Samsung is still the partner brand on the signboards, 25 years on
Put the two businesses next to each other in 2013 and the gap is obvious. Motif had to find engineers, bring in parts through a border with no port behind it, run a warranty desk, and persuade people to pay Samsung money for a name they had never seen on a phone. IMS had to sign with a Korean company that already spent the marketing money, and put finished boxes on a truck from India. Same market, roughly five million handsets a year, and one of those two jobs is a great deal harder than the other.
The distributor model won because it never had to make anything. That is not a criticism of IMS, it is the smart play in a market this size, and Malhotra’s generation turned a phone distributorship into a conglomerate on it. But it means that for 25 years the money in Nepali phones has gone to the company that imports best, not the one that builds.
The Tax That Made Assembling A Phone Dearer Than Importing One
Then there is the part that the NTA itself wrote down, and it is the closest thing we found to an answer on why Motif could not last.
In June 2021 the Nepal Telecommunications Authority put a working group on exactly this question, handset assembly and refurbishment in Nepal, with people from the Finance Ministry and the Mobile Phone Importers’ Association on it. Their final report has the number that matters:
Components for a phone, the resistors, capacitors, printed circuit boards, carried a 10 percent excise duty on import. A finished phone carried 2.5 percent.
So if you were Motif in 2013 bringing in the parts to assemble an Ultimate in Kathmandu, the state taxed your inputs at four times the rate it taxed the Samsung box coming in whole. The report calls that discrepancy a problem in so many words, raw inputs taxed more heavily than the finished product. It is the kind of line a government writes eight years after the company it would have saved has disappeared.
The same report said what it would take to fix it, and the list is long:
- Component duty set below the finished-phone duty
- A ten year income tax holiday for small domestic manufacturers
- A telecom manufacturing fund with soft loans
- Customs clearance of components inside seven days
- NTA certification of assembly plants, which implies there would be some
The same report also set out why it was hard, and the figures are its own:
- Demand fully met by imports, about 5.2 million units a year
- Worth roughly Rs 21 billion a year at customs
- A small domestic market against a large investment need
- Its suggested way out was to copy Vietnam and India and build for export, from a landlocked country with no component industry
Five years on from that report there is still no plant for the NTA to certify.
India And Pakistan Built Plants, Nepal Built MDMS
The two neighbours went the other way on the same tax question, and the dates matter:
- India, Micromax opened its own plant at Rudrapur in April 2014, Make in India came the same year, and from 2017 the Phased Manufacturing Programme raised duty on finished phones step by step until Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and in the end Apple’s contractors assembled there because importing had become the dear option
- Pakistan, about 34 percent of phones sold in 2019 were locally assembled, the 2020 mobile device manufacturing policy made parts cheap and finished imports dear, and by 2025 local assembly was almost 94 percent of the market across 37 licensed plants
- Pakistan again, a 2026 to 2033 policy now aims at exports above 500 million dollars and is inviting Samsung and Apple to build
Both of them did what the NTA report asked for in 2021, tax the finished box, go easy on the parts. Nepal did it the other way round in Motif’s year and has not reversed it.
Nepal’s answer in the same period was MDMS. The Mobile Device Management System went fully live on 6 November 2023, and what it does is block any phone whose IMEI is not registered from working on Nepali networks. Register it, pay Rs 10,000 for an iPhone or anything over a lakh, Rs 3,000 for an Android under a lakh, and it works. Migrant workers coming home can bring two new phones without the extra tax.
Which is fine as a customs tool. The grey phones from Delhi and Dubai that used to come in at half price now get caught. But notice what it is. India and Pakistan built the policy that makes phones; Nepal built the policy that counts them coming in. Same decade, same region, same Chinese supply chain available to all three, and we chose the register.
What A Nepali Buyer Gets Now
StatCounter’s September numbers for Nepal, mobile vendor share:
- Apple 25 percent
- Samsung 21.65 percent
- Xiaomi 21.18 percent
- Vivo 6.92, Oppo 5.59, Realme 4.8
Apple on top is odd for this region. In India and Pakistan it is single digits. Here it is a quarter of the market, and you can see why from this post, the MDMS fee is flat so a ten thousand rupee registration on a two lakh phone is nothing, workers coming home from the Gulf can bring two phones tax free, and after twenty years of IMS putting Samsung in every town the brand people trade up from is already a premium one.
And every phone in that list was assembled somewhere else:
- The Samsung came through IMS from a plant in India or Vietnam
- The Xiaomi came from an Indian plant that exists because of the 2017 duty rules
- The iPhone came in hand luggage from Doha or Kuala Lumpur and was registered at the airport
They are good phones. In 2013 a company in this city put four of its own on a table at an expo, and at that time the tax on a capacitor was higher than the tax on a Galaxy. If anyone knows what became of Surendra Manandhar and the Motif line, the comments are open.
