India Based Phone Maker Micromax Shifts Its Focus To Electric Vehicles

Micromax Informatics once had a firm grip on the local mobile phone market in India, but a mix of stronger competition, coupled with the rapid pace of technology development and the ongoing market slowdown, has left it spinning.

While some believe that it still has some life in it as a mobile brand, sources and fillings point to something else: it’s eyeing up to step into mobility, specifically into the area of electric vehicles.

Micromax declined to comment about the job cuts and other details of this story.

The EV move would come in the form of a new brand and focus, at least initially, on two-wheel electric vehicles, according to three individuals who recently lefty the company.

History Of Micromax

Founded in 2000 by Vikas Jain, Rahul Sharma, Sumit Kumar Arora and Rajesh Agarwal, Micromax first started life as a small IT firm, coming into the field of mobile phones in 2008. The initial journey of the company relied on low-cost feature phones. Affordable Android smartphones and tablets entered the frame sometime after, dovetailing with a rising consumer class in India that wanted the latest gadgets, but didn’t have the money to buy a Samsung, Nokia or BlackBerry device- let alone an iPhone.

Problems Faced by Micromax

The first market problems started in 2014 when Xiaomi and other Chinese vendors started to get considerably more focused on India, disrupting Micromax in the same way that Micromax had disrupted Samsung before it, with highly affordable, Chinese- made models across different price segments.

“China-based vendors managed to get quality devices, high specifications and the latest technology at affordable prices with huge marketing and channel spends,” Singh said. “Indian vendors were just not able to compete in these levers- product, marketing, channel, etc. As a result, they lost the market to brands like Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo and Samsung.”