Founded in 1991 by Rajesh Agarwal and later joined by Rahul Sharma, Sumit Arora, and Vikas Jain in 1998 as co-founders, MICROMAX is the latest mobile handset revolution of over $6.3 billion Indian Market. In a short span of one and half year micromax not only created its 14 percent share in the markets but also stung the mobile handset giant NOKIA and stung really hard which results that Nokia lost its market share from 64% in 2008-09 to 52% in last year. In 1995 when Nokia entered in India, completion was almost negligible and they made their best by recognizing the demand of typical Indian consumer. But for last 2-3 years Nokia continuously losing its market share and the may be main reasons are lack of features, hanging problem in handsets, lack of variety and outdated models etc. Moreover the changing tastes of price sensitive Indian consumers and incapability in meeting to these needs working against the Finnish giant. Nokia have to work a lot now to revive or at least stop losing more market share, and may be a way is to get that the trust of consumer back by convincing them that they are still India’s more reliable brand in mobile handset market, but now it is as difficult as walking on fire.
On the other hand micromax shown the real business sense and continue grabbing the market with rocketing speed. Unlikely started from rural market and now targeting youth effectively, micromax is selling on an average of 1 million handsets every month. The capability of understanding the needs of consumers effectively and provide them the product according to the demand in market is the key to success for micromax. More features at very low cost is the other reason of success of micromax. Micromax creates handset designs in India and assembles them with the help of its Chinese partner in order to lower down the manufacturing cost which makes micromax to keep low price of its handsets in market.
Unlikely, micromax started its journey from rural market by launching its Xii phone with the special USP of 30 days long battery backup and kept its cost near about Rs 2100 to Rs 2200, keeping the fact in the eyes that more than half of population of India is living in rural areas and where electricity is just like a ‘full moon’, which appears rarely. The phone was a big hit and it was the starting of success period for micromax. Targeting the rural market was not easy because distribution was the issue and micromax handled effectively, Micromax created a distribution network comprising of 34 super distributors, 450 distributors and around 55,000 retailers (according to available data in secondary data). Moreover micromax controlled its cash collection by offering the margins to the dealers.
After tasting the blood of success in rural segment it was the time to move towards urban market and things were not easy because not only the big snakes like nokia, Samsung were in competition but small reptiles like lava, fly etc were threats. Micromax planned to target youths and came up with some handsets which were fully loaded with surprising features at unexpectedly lower cost. They hold the right nerve of consumers (specially youth) and came up with the feature accordingly, from high quality music phones, QWERTY keypads phones for social sites lovers to 3G users they came up with every handset with fair prices and micromax became a new buzz in mobile handset segment with high growth rate.
Another thing that micromax done in fact doing effectively is the promotion part. Whether it was IPL or any other big occasion micromax proved its strong presence and marketing capability. Micromax advertises heavily on TV and other modes of communications. They are continuously sponsoring the big cricket events etc. They had chosen Akshay Kumar as their brand ambassador, when he is on the high in his career; they even used Twinkle (Akshay’s wife) for their twinkle phone ‘bling’. Bling is a phone with special twinkling effects body, specially designed for women and girls and they tried to associate Akshay’s wife name (who is also an actress) with the phone USP.
Like the previous year, this year too Micromax would like to keep its growth higher. According to news, in 2011 micromax is targeting to sale near about 30 million mobile handsets in India and 6 million mobile handsets in Latin America and Africa.
No comments:
Post a Comment