Dubai: India’s consumer electronics company Micromax, which has entered the Middle East and North Africa markets for the second time with its mobile phones, aims to be in the top five in the next two years, said the company’s co-founder.
Vikas Jain, co-founder of Micromax, told Gulf News after launching its latest device — Canvas 2 — that the company was launched in 2010 and knows well the pulse of the consumers.
Micromax exited the Gulf markets at the end of 2013. After re-entering the region in February this year, it has already expanded into eight markets.
Despite being the second-largest mobile phone brand in India and the tenth-largest globally, the company is facing stiff pressure with the entry of Chinese brands like Oppo, Huawei, Lenovo, Vivo and Xiaomi.
Micromax, which had an 18.3 per cent smartphone market share in 2014, had dropped to 11.9 per cent last year.
Jain said that the mobile phone market is like a Formula One car race in the sense that the winner will not by judged on the basis of the first lap or where his position after one kilometre. According to him, one has to be consistent lap by lap and complete the 65 laps for the winner to be determined.
“Whichever markets we entered, we have faced competition and [are] still facing competition. That is not something that has daunted the brand. It is the next set of expectations of consumers that allow us to encourage to build our next device,” he said.
A study by Counterpoint Research’s Market Monitor service shows that Micromax is the second-largest handset brand in Russia, next to Samsung and ahead of Apple.
Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner, said that the smartphone market is crowded everywhere. It is an overly competitive market and the smartphone as a device has become commoditised, making it very difficult for vendors to differentiate their offerings.
From this perspective, he said that Micromax definitely has similar challenges in an overly competitive market. It really matters how Micromax is going to differentiate their offerings.
“Chinese firms have been aggressive than the Indian brands in capturing market share and minds of the buyers. The Indian brands are struggling at this point of time when it comes to acquiring design skills, access to components and manufacturing facilities and access to funds when it comes to Chinese counterparts,” he said.
Some of the positives Gupta sees for Micromax are that they have been in the market for a long time and have come to understand the consumers. He said they also have better access to channels and distribution but admitted that where they come up short is in coming up with “cool and innovative designs” and expanding the portfolio to cover the broader consumer segment and branding.
Jain said that despite Canvas 2 being priced at Dh499, it has the latest Corning Gorilla Glass 5 display, 3GB of RAM, 16GB of ROM, a fingerprint sensor, as well as 13MP and 5MP front cameras, respectively.
Micromax has estimated that international operations will contribute nearly half of the company’s total revenue in the next three to four years. The international business currently contributes about more than 20 per cent of the total phones sold by Micromax annually.
Jain said that the company will launch 10 models this year, some at higher price point. The key markets are the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
