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Former actor Asin’s husband, Rahul Sharma, is considered a pioneer of the mobile phone industry in India. As one of the co-founders of Micromax, he successfully challenged international brands such as Nokia and Samsung, at least for a while. Not too long after Micromax became one of the biggest players in the industry, incoming competition from Chinese brands brought the company to its knees. Rahul pivoted, and is now in the manufacturing business. In a recent appearance on Nikhil Kamath’s podcast, he recalled the origins of his company, and said that the idea to make mobile phones came to him while he was travelling in remote areas of India.
He discovered that entire villages would pay exorbitant amounts of money to one vendor just to charge their phones. Rahul said that he decided to make a phone with long battery life. He said, “I sat with the guys, worked on the GSM technology, and said, ‘Why don’t we make a mobile phone?’ The first reaction internally was, ‘Are you crazy? Who’s going to fight these Nokias and Samsungs and Motorolas? We are doing so well, you are driving a BMW 3 Series, why do you want to disturb the apple cart?’ I said, ‘No, the food is being cooked in different countries, we need an Indian flavour’.”
He continued, “I fought a lot with my co-founders internally, and they said, ‘Okay, we’ll make 10,000. If it works, it’s fine, otherwise our business is doing well.’ They gave me around Rs 20 crore. We decided to make a phone with long battery life, because of all these experiences. That’s how the first Micromax phone came, and the tagline was, ‘Mobile ka baap’. The standby time was 30 days… We made a phone, and then went to the distributors. The real problem started from there.”
Rahul said that he couldn’t find a distributor for his product, and was sitting on an inventory of 10,000 phones. “Even the Delhi distributor of Nokia was bigger than us,” he said, adding, “We went back to our fixed wireless guys, and asked if they’d be willing to distribute it. We left some of our inventory with them, and within 10 days, they were sold out. Repeat orders started coming in, and things became crazy.”
In the same interview, Rahul said that at its peak, Micromax was doing a turnover of more than Rs 12,000 crore. Because they had so much operating income, they decided against raising investment even though they were in talks with Alibaba for Rs 6,700 crore. Rahul said that he regrets the decision, because taking the money would have given him ammunition in a battle with Chinese competitors. But, things worked out for him. He said that his company is making more money now than Micromax did back in the day. Rahul and Asin tied the knot in 2016, after being introduced to each other by Akshay Kumar.
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