Striving to be a part of the top five clubs in the world by 2020, India India’s local smartphone brand Micromax is all set to sell its phones in the Chinese market. Specific plans have not yet been revealed by India’s largest home bred handset maker.
The company said in a statement on Friday, “The vision will be realised by going to multiple countries, by being not only a hardware company, but a hardware and services company, and hence the experience. For this, Micromax is open for a financial event over the next 24 months”.
There are plans to roll out a single model in China collaborating with its e-commerce giants. Aiming to have an exclusive Chinese mobile phone portfolio, the company looks to partner with local players and even offer a different operating system if needed be, it added.
Navkendar Singh, senior research manager at IDC, India, said, “Micromax cannot achieve its major objective of being No. 5 in the world if it is not in the largest mobile phone market in the world,” said.
There are also plans to generate cash to fund the acquisition of companies that would help Micromax build a network of services to make its phones stand out in the crowd of competitors.
Vikas Jain, co-founder of Micromax Informatics said at the RISE Conference in Hong Kong on June 2, Jain reportedly said that the firm Micromax believes China to be an important market in future given the size of the phone business in that country.
“The company can’t do that without more cash coming in,” he said.
Also to ensure that it is well-equipped to take on the companies like Vivo, Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi and Lenovo, it would be raising additional funds in the next two years, either privately or by going public.
Business in such a variegated market like China is both exciting and risky at the same time. Being the world’s biggest phone market, Micromax may be able to get a slice of this burgeoning market. Nearly 500 million phones were sold in China in 2015.
There go a lot of similarities between the Chinese and Indian market like value conscious buyers and same set of companies; however the software and the hardware that goes inside the phones in China can vary significantly compared to phones sold in global markets.
Entering the market would also be tricky for Micromax because the Android phones sold in China don’t have the Google Play store installed on them. Instead the version of Android on most Chinese phones is heavily modified and has many local components.
Melissa Chau, senior research manager with IDC stated that along China’s maturing smartphone adoption curve, the companies most aligned with growth are those with products serving increasingly sophisticated consumers.
“Lenovo benefited in 2013, and Xiaomi (won in) 2014 and 2015. Now Huawei, OPPO, and Vivo, which play mainly are positioned for a strong 2016, These new vendors would be well-advised not to rest on their laurels though, as this dynamic smartphone landscape has shown to even cult brands like Xiaomi that customer loyalty is difficult to consistently maintain.”
Micromax also sells its phones in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Russia. Jain said that the company is also studying the US market, and could enter more than one new country in the next 12 months.
Unlike its more mid-range subsidiary, Yu, Micromax is aggressively focused on selling affordable smartphones. Its more expensive phones are priced around $220, but go as cheap as $75.
