It’s been a while and Micromax’s name seem to be sliding off the smartphone market. The name almost brings back faded memories about this erstwhile India handset manufacturer. Actually, it is not that long time ago and was only last year that Micromax started losing big time to Chinese brands Vivo and Oppo. Chinese smartphone makers dished out a range of smartphones with impressive specs and performance in lucrative price, not to mention the extensive marketing strategies these makers adopted to get the attention of Indian buyers. And now we have more names, like Xiaomi, Redmi, and OnePlus, these brands are now eating big slices of smartphone pie in India.
Micromax has stopped releasing new products since last year and it has reason of its own. According to a news report by Economic Times, Micromax is gearing up to make a comeback and claim its position that it used to have with a bunch of smartphones under its ‘Yu’ brand. Not much is known about this name, only that it is complete subsidiary of Micromax. The company tweeted about its Yu Ace last week and has been unveiled on August 30. It is an entry-level phone priced at Rs 5,999 and is available only through Flipkart. The sale will begin from September 6th in India. Micromax makes a case for its 4,000 mAH battery, 18:9 Full Vision Display, Face Unlock and Fingerprint Sensor. On optics front, the rear camera will be a single 13MP sensor, and a 5MP selfie shooter with a front-facing LED light. Micromax plans to launch three more devices in the coming months under its ‘Yu’ brand name.
At the end of December 2016 Micromax had a share of 8.8 percent in India’s smartphone market and was just after Samsung and Lenovo in the third place. The picture was not bad for this Indian brand. But things started looking grim from 2017 and after the first quarter Micromax was relegated to lower position and did not even came in the top 5 names in India’s best-selling smartphone brands. After that it went into a long hibernation only to emerge with new strategies with its Yu brand. In an interview with ET, Micromax co-founder Vikas Jain said that India’s smartphone market has undergone a sea-change since the September of 2016 after the launch of Reliance Jio services. The pace at which data connectivity has evolved since then, from poor to super-fast, it has opened a whole new space with buyers from different economic conditions in India. Micromax believes the prospects with faster data connectivity has opened new spheres. After investing quite some time during its hibernation, Micromax has been able to understand buyer’s quotient to regain its lost world.
India has a burgeoning smartphone market which is a fisheye for every name out there. It is among the largest globally, with 33.5 million units of phones shipped in June 2018. Samsung and Xiaomi are ruling names in India, followed by Vivo, and Oppo.
Micromax is a name that is synonymous to manufacturing phones that packs technology in a minimal price tag. The new Yu Ace continues to follow its same ideals.
