Micromax: the Indian Samsung?

Micromax is all over the news(and ads); its flagship phone Canavas Turbo became available for preorder on 26th October.

Canvas Turbo has top notch specs and dashing looks, neck to neck with flagship phones of all popular brands out there in Indian mobile handset market, not to mention that Micromax has roped in Hugh Jackman as it's brand ambassador. And more important is the fact that Canvas Turbo can't be written off as a fluke because Micromax has done it before with Canavas, Canavas HD and Canavas Doodle (As per IDC report, Micromax was only second to Samsung going by total number of smart phone units sold in Quarter2, 2013).

Micromax Canvas Turbo

Samsung Galaxy S4

At a broad level, Micromax story is eerily similar to Samsung story. Samsung started as an underdog(HTC was the top android phone maker at the beginning of android story) with low end phones and then hit the jackpot with Galaxy series phone. Once at the front of the line, Samsung maintained its lead, refreshing the Galaxy line and adding more variants to it and the rest as we all know is history. Samsung has had a great run from Galaxy S to Galaxy S4 and Galaxy Note to Galaxy Note3 (it announced a record profit of $9.96 billion in July-September, 2013) and hopefully will continue. Micromax started as an underdog with cheap re-branded Chinese phones in the low-end segment, steadily moved up the value chain and hit the jackpot with it's Canvas line of android smart phones. Since making it big, Micromax has continuously refreshed Canavas line to bring it closer to flagship handsets of well known brands at that time and has adopted well thought ad campaigns to shed its image of a company assembling and selling Chinese phones.

If Samsung is guilty of making iPhone knock offs(at least in initial stages), Micromax is guilty of making Samsung knock offs. Samsung tried(successfully) to match the features of each new iteration of iPhone(and by some accounts, it still does the same) at lower price point, Micromax is playing catch up with each new iteration of Samsung's flagship phone at lower prices. 

If Lenovo can make it big in China in spite of all big brands being present there because it understood the local markets well, so can Micromax, because it understands Indian markets . Only time will tell whether it's strategy is  a successful strategy  or not but as an Indian I welcome the rise of Indian Samsung!