After taking on multinational brands such as Nokia and Samsung, Micromax’s co-founder Rahul Sharma has a new dream. To make smartphones available at Rs 1,000-2000 price point.
Most multi-national companies are looking at launching smartphones at around the Rs 5,000-mark in the Indian market, Micromax wants to make devices more affordable.
“If some one on this planet has to do it, you put our name on that. As and when we have the technology to do it, we will certainly try and do something,” Rahul Sharma, Co-Founder, Micromax Informatics, told
Though smartphones at Rs 2,000 is still a distant dream, the changing dynamics of the industry does not make it impossible.
‘No price war’
Sharma said Micromax is not in any price war, but the company since inception is always working on launching products as per the Indian customers’ needs, especially the youth.
“If it were only about pricing, then everybody would have come out with various products at various pricing, but they are not. We use right amount of components and understand at what price a technology you can bring in our products,” he said. He said the company is also working on launching smartphones based on 4G once the long-term evolution infrastructure is in place, which would be also priced ‘right’.
“We have clearly led our specifications that what set of chips we need and at price point we want to sell the handset. We want to bring the technology for the common people,” he said. Meanwhile, the company launched its latest smartphone, Canvas 4, priced at Rs 17,999, which will come to the market by this weekend. The company has already got pre-bookings of around 11,500 units.
Canvas series
The Canvas series, which has 10 devices in the price range of Rs 6,000 to Rs 18,000, were sold more than a million units over the last three months, he said adding that the company is selling around 2.2 million units of its overall mobile phones in a month.
Sharma said revenue-wise, the company is drawing 50:50 from feature phones and smartphones, while in terms of volumes, smartphones makes around 40 per cent and rest comes from feature phones.
According to a latest CyberMedia report, Micromax is positioned number three with 9 per cent in overall mobile phones sold during January-April from total volume of 73.5 million units.
It stood at number two in the total 9.4 million smartphones sold with 19 per cent during the period.