What went wrong with Micromax?

Reading success stories about start-ups is nice but failure stories benefit you more as there are some important things to be learned from others drops. The Indian market for smartphones is very competitive and it is not an easy task to reach the top of this segment.

Micromax is one brand that saw in a very short time all of the Indian market. With this post, I attempted to explain why this popular mobile brand sees the dust of this profit-making business.

Early Days
Prior to being a separate entity, Micromax was the distributor of Nokia called Micromax Informatics.
Payphone was its main business. When Nokia sold the payphone company, Micromax began sourcing Chinese phones, rebranding them and selling them under the brand name of Micromax.
Soon the Chinese retailer saw the Indian market’s potential and they began selling their phones under their own brands.

Enterprise method
There was a time when Indian entrepreneurs only concentrated on profits instead of creativity. Micromax followed a similar strategy as the company did very little creativity and simply repackaged the Chinese devices.
CEO Sanjay Kapoor developed an R&D hub in Bengaluru in 2014–2015, employed 80–90 software-engineers to develop UI. The founders had no interest in these things and Sanjay has been thrown out of Micromax. We all know the results afterwards.

4G Effect
Many Indian brands like Micromax had no idea that 4G would catch Indian market so fast.
70 percent of Micromax’s devices were 3G, and it took a long time for them to pick up the pace and get 4G ready.

Hesitant to change
Micromax mostly focused India’s mobile phone market for Rs 5000-10,000. This price had very strong competition that was very tough to beat.
The company never attempted to launch a premium phone. Later they launched Micromax Turbo in the mid-range market, but it was too late to do so and did not help.