In response, the company designed its first model, the X1i, with an oversized battery, a small screen, and tweaked electronics that made the phone run for as long as five days, and on standby for as many as 30 days.
“It was really the most obvious thing to do,” says Jain, who co-founded the company in 1991 with three friends. “Here was something that provided customers a feature nobody else had bothered to give them -- battery life.”
Micromax now sells about 1 million handsets a month, with 37 models tailored to local tastes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports in its August 16 issue. The company has about 4 per cent of the $6.3 billion Indian market, eating into the sales of Nokia Oyj, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, whose share in India fell to 52 per cent by the end of last year from 64 per cent in 2008.
Micromax’s phones start at $40 and few of them sport Wi-Fi, 3G, or GPS capabilities. That keeps costs down in a country with sporadic Internet access and little 3G coverage. One phone doubles as a Nintendo Co Wii-like controller, allowing users to play video games. Another, marketed heavily with Bollywood- themed TV commercials, has costume jewelry embedded in it and swivels open to reveal a full keyboard.
Product focus
Closely-held Micromax’s approach has attracted interest from Boston-based TA Associates Inc, a $16 billion private equity fund that invested $45 million in the company in January for an undisclosed stake.
“We did spend a lot of time with the broader universe of Indian phone makers,” says Naveen Wadhera, a TA Associates Advisory director based in Mumbai who worked on the deal. “But what we specifically wanted was someone with a real focus on product and a real effort at innovating. The others have a bit of a ‘me-too’ sort of strategy.”
Micromax has led the assault on Nokia by Indian phone makers, which as a group have grabbed 14 per cent of the market, according to research by Indian trade magazine Voice&Data. Nokia isn’t giving up on the market.
Carl Zeiss, anthropologists
At its Gurgaon offices, near New Delhi, Nokia is hosting a group of Indian tech bloggers who were writing about its latest touchscreen model with a Carl Zeiss lens.
Elsewhere in the country, anthropologists working for Nokia track the results of an experiment where the company gave every person in four neighboring villages a free phone with access to local weather, crop, and other information.
Each Nokia phone spends nearly 18 months in development, says Nokia India Vice-President and Managing Director D. Shivakumar, with models tested for water exposure, bent by robots, and shaken around in boxes full of sharp objects.
“Nokia’s one of those companies that nobody pays attention to when it does well,” he says. “It’s like when Roger Federer wins at Wimbledon, nobody talks about it. But lose once...”
Nokia’s stock has dropped 24 per cent in the last twelve months, as margins suffered from its failure to bring out a high-end smartphone to take on Apple Inc’s iPhone. Sales of high-end handsets have lagged behind worldwide, and the company cut forecasts twice in three months over delays in finishing the software for the N8, a flagship new model.
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