No More India’s Leading Brand: Micromax Trails Xiaomi, Huawei

The India-based mobile brand is battling to retain its position in the country against brands like Xiaomi, Lenovo.

A year ago, Micromax vaulted past Samsung Electronics Co Ltd to become India’s leading smartphone brand. Today, its market share has nearly halved, several top executives have resigned, and the company is looking for growth outside India.

In Micromax’s slide to second place is a tale of the promise and peril of India’s booming but hyper-competitive smartphone industry.

India is the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market. Shipments of smartphones jumped 29 percent to 103 million units last year.

Rapid growth has helped nurture a crop of local brands, led by Micromax, that outsourced production to Chinese manufacturers. Now, as Samsung rolls out more affordable phones, the same Chinese factories are entering the Indian market with their own brands, depressing prices and forcing Indian mobile makers to rethink their strategies.

What the Indian brands did to the global brands two years ago, Chinese phone makers are doing the same to Indian brands now. And over the next year, we see tremendous competition for Micromax and other Indian smartphone makers.

Tarun Pathak, Analyst, Counterpoint Research

Former executives said the lack of fresh funding undermined a proposal by the new executives to move Micromax’s research and design operations, which had previously been outsourced, in-house. The move was intended to help Micromax differentiate itself from generic Android clones.

We hired about 80-90 people in Bangalore to do in-house software and design, but with no money from the investors and little interest from the founders, that team fizzled away and that office has been partially shut down now.

Former Micromax Executive

At least five senior executives have resigned since November. The latest was Vineet Taneja, chief executive since 2014, who quit last week.

In 2015, Chinese brands doubled their market share to 18 percent, according to Counterpoint Research, taking away business from Indian budget phone makers such as Micromax, Intex, Lava and Karbonn. Indian brands’ market share fell from 48 to 43 percent last year.

In the final quarter of 2015, Micromax’s shipments fell by 12.1 percent, against growth of 15.4 percent for the sector, according to industry tracker IDC. Micromax’s share of the smartphone market fell to 13 percent in the fourth quarter from 22 percent at its peak in 2014, according to IDC.

Chinese phone makers including LeEco, Xiaomi and Lenovo have also partnered with e-commerce companies including Amazon India and Flipkart to sell phones directly to consumers, saving on distribution and sales and reaching new online shoppers directly.