Dubai
India’s consumer electronics company Micromax Informatics has re-entered the Gulf markets for the second time with its mobile phones.
“When we entered the Gulf for the first time, the demand was more for smartphones at that time rather than feature phones while it was feature phones in India. The Gulf was much ahead of India at that time. We were too early to enter the market but it gave us a good inside of the market and the consumer behaviour,” Rahul Sharma, co-founder of Micromax, said in a telephone interview with Gulf News.
However, he said that it is the right time for Micromax to re-enter the Gulf as demand for smartphones are booming in India and “we are also well prepared with the portfolio of products and capture exactly what the consumers are looking at.”
Micromax exited the Gulf markets by end of 2013. After re-entering the region in February this year, it has already expanded into eight markets.
Despite being the second largest selling brand in India, the company is facing 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.
A study by Counterpoint Research’s Market Monitor service shows that Micromax is the second-largest handset brand in Russia with a 10 per cent share, next to Samsung and ahead of Apple’s eight per cent.
When asked how his company plans to cope up with the competition, Sharma said that competition will continue, and without competition, the market will not flourish.
“When we started feature phones, it was Nokia, and then came Samsung, Nokia, LG and Sony in the smartphone race. The only thing now is that names have changed, instead of international brands it is Chinese brands,” he said.
Moreover, he said that with one Chinese company is already struggling in the Indian market and others are revisiting their pricing strategy, “we want to get back and reclaim our position.”
“For us, the question was should we participate in the crowded and discounted market for the namesake or wait for the dust to settle in. So, we choose the latter one and took a back seat in 2016,” he said.
He said the company did a lot of back-end work, such as investing in 10 start-ups and setting up three more factories.
“We thought we will attack the market by end of Diwali last year but then demonetisation happened. So we postponed our launches. Our launches started by end of February this year and we are now launching products one by one. Micromax will regain this year whatever it lost in 2016,” he said.
Micromax is a challenger brand, he said and added that it will maintain its position.
“We are not a sprinter; we are here for the marathon. If we were losing ground, we would not have invested so much. The investments we make show that we are here for the long run,” he said.
“We wanted to create an ecosystem of services and have invested in travel companies, food companies, artificial intelligence and we are blending all of them into our phones. We have also invested in our own mobile wallet and operating system,” he added.
Micromax has also ventured into TVs and A/Cs in India but Sharma said the company will venture into other consumer products one by one.
“Our first priority for the Middle East is mobile phones and once we consolidate, we will launch other consumer products in the Middle East also,” he said.
