Veni, Vidi, Vici?

Vivo capped a splendid performance in 2019 by toppling Samsung to become No 2 in the October to December quarter. Can the Chinese smartphone maker maintain its winning run once the Covid-19 dust settles down?

- Rajiv Singh

“Vivo India is the second biggest after China. Over the next five years, our plan is to shift gears from a follower to a leader.”

Simple things, reckons Jerome Chen, are easy to understand, but quite difficult to do. It’s early March, Holi is just a few days away, and the only colour that’s visible across the satellite city of Gurugram is blue hoardings of Vivo smartphones on huge metro pillars.

Sitting in a café on the ground floor of the Palms Spring Plaza building, just 100 metres from Vivo Sector 53-54 metro station in Gurugram, Chen looks bemused. Every day scores of bikers and speeding cars miss the U-turn on the main road that goes towards Delhi. A huge signboard reading ‘Slow down for a U-turn’ falls on their blind spot. “They just need to see the sign and follow it. It’s that simple,” says Chen, irritation in his voice quite palpable. “Simple things,” reinforces the chief executive officer of Vivo India who came to the country in August 2014 to set up operations, “are difficult to do.”

Three years back, towards the end of 2017, Chen too was guilty of oversight, and failing to do simple things. The writing was on the wall, but he couldn’t see it. For a company that swears by the philosophy of slow is fast, over-speeding was turning out to be dangerous. In just a year, market share had zoomed from 3.6 percent in the second quarter of 2016 to 12.6 percent a year later.