Former actor Asin’s husband, Rahul Sharma, co-founded one of the biggest players in the mobile phone arena, Micromax. But after a few years during which it dominated the Indian market and took on international brands, it was forced to perform a major pivot. Chinese brands emerged, and the supply chain turned towards them. In several interviews, Rahul has spoken about Micromax’s downfall, which was highly publicised because of how huge the company had become. It was during this period of growth that he married Asin, who backed away from the film industry immediately afterwards.
Appearing on Raj Shamani’s podcast this year, Rahul said that at its peak, Micromax was among the 10 biggest mobile phone companies in the world. It had successfully fended off competition from the likes of Nokia and Samsung in India, and was delivering a turnover of between Rs 12,000 crore and Rs 15,000 crore. But things began turning around shortly afterwards. “Bouncer pe bouncer pad raha tha, uss time full-toss pe bhi bowled ho rahe they,” he said.
He said, “What happened with Micromax didn’t happen only with Micromax; it was a global phenomenon. There was a lot of brands globally at the time, but people spoke about us because we were the biggest. The supply chain started shifting, and when the supply chain started shifting…” Rahul said that his company’s differentiator was innovation, and they weren’t allowed to innovate because Chinese manufacturers entered into exclusive deals with emerging Chinese brands. “Imagine if today, I want to make a triple-screen phone. I can’t, because I don’t have the components. Which means I no longer have the edge. We tried for two years, but after a point, we decided that there is no point in burning more money… You can keep burning if there is success at the end of the tunnel, but when the opponent has an endless supply of resources, it makes no sense.”
In an appearance on Nikhil Kamath’s podcast, Rahul said that they turned down funding of $800 million from Alibaba in 2014, which, in hindsight, was possibly a mistake. “We thought that if we’d taken care of the Finnish and the Koreans at that time, we could take care of the Chinese too… That was a different game, because when the Chinese came, they came with so much gunpowder,” he said. Rahul has now pivoted to the manufacturing business, and is making more money now than he ever did before. “Today, our revenue is way bigger than what we used to do in our brand. Most people would probably not know. But we are doing way better than what we used to do earlier,” he told Nikhil Kamath.
