YU will be a game changer: Rahul Sharma

Interview with Co-founder, Micromax

Over the past 15 years, Rahul Sharma, along with friends Vikas Jain, Sumeet Arora and Rajesh Agarwal, has built Micromax into India's largest home-grown mobile handset maker. However, horizontal growth is not the only thing Sharma is concerned about. Sharma speaks to Sounak Mitra about 'Yureka' (YU), the new brand the company will launch next month, and how he sees the future shaping up. Edited excerpts:

You have been working for about a year on the project. What direction is it taking?

Micromax has been growing pretty satisfactorily. And, this will continue. What we realised is that we should move into the connected world. Next month, we'll launch 'YU', our new brand, initially for mobile devices, targeting technology natives.

Why a new brand? Will it be owned by Micromax?

The DNA is different, so is the target audience and the ecosystem. YU will be completely online, and will sell devices and services that will enhance customer experience. It will be a game changer but will not hurt the Micromax brand. It will be owned by YU Televentures, a subsidiary of Micromax Informatics. YU will only operate on established e-commerce platforms and on our own online channel.

What will YU bring in?

YU is developed in partnership with Cyanogen, the maker of the Android-based Cyanogen operating system, as we don't want to stick to just stock Android any longer. With our own development team in Bengaluru, which has 250 people working on the project, along with a hardware support (research and development) team in Beijing, there will be updates for the new platform every two weeks. On the other hand, there will be about 200 new features that will make the user experience far better than anything available in the market. And, there will be a bouquet of services across verticals.

With YU, we'll disrupt the market again with aggressive pricing and rich specifications. However, we can't share pricing now. We will offer the best value for money in the world. There will be more products across device segments in future.

Is this your entry point into the services business?

For YU, services will be the main business while hardware or devices will be an enabler. In future, we will become a services company, an Internet company. It will be a business of connected devices in the connected world. The time is not far when you'll see us making all kinds of devices and services people use or may use or wear in daily life.

What kind of services?

We may look at  health, education, security, entertainment, e-commerce, gaming. Our development team has been working based on user demand and need. Innovation will depend on what people may need after a few years, not necessarily now.

Where will you produce these devices?

Development of both services and devices will happen in India. Initially, we'll get our devices manufactured in China by a new set of vendors. However, we'll eventually start manufacturing YU branded devices at our Rudrapur factory. We have a capacity of 1.2 million handsets every month, but it is partially used at present. And we can increase the capacity as and when needed.

How much money have you put in and how much is lined up?

Over the past year we have invested a lot. But I can't share a number. YU will be run as a separate business, not as an extension.