The Return Of Micromax

After getting blitzed out of the market by Chinese smartphone makers, desi brand Micromax is making a comeback. Aided by a rising anti-China sentiment, it wants to regain its old position. Will it succeed?

- Sumant Banerji

Micromax Co-founder Rahul Sharma is not superstitious. But when he re-focussed his attention on the struggling consumer electronics firm, one of the decisions was to go back to the company’s old office in Udyog Vihar Phase V in Gurgaon. Earlier, when the going was good, Micromax had shifted base barely a kilometre away to a bigger office in the adjacent Phase IV. Going back to the same building where it started its journey in smartphones more than a decade ago and where it scaled dizzying heights, is symbolic of what the company is aiming to do ahead — script the same success story all over again.

“We want our old position back. That is the target, else we would not be making this comeback,” says Sharma. “We understand the sweet spot of this market and you will have a Micromax product disrupting all of these sweet spots. We have the infrastructure and manufacturing set-up in place and are investing big time in R&D. We are here to disrupt.”

As any market leader will testify, getting to the top is not an easy task. What is more difficult is staying there. And since 2015, Micromax has discovered just that. The decade gone by was one of the contrasting halves for the firm that was founded in 1991 as a distributor of computer hardware.

An early entrant in the smartphone market in India in the late 2000s, the firm had a meteoric rise in the first half of the last decade. By the end of 2014, it had overtaken long-time market leader and South Korea's Samsung as the country’s largest smartphone maker. It was akin to David taking down Goliath, but it did not stay that way for long.