Schemes like PLI are attracting the electronics supply chain to India, which was not the case earlier, said Micromax founder Rahul Sharma on Thursday while reflecting on the journey of Micromax.
He said that India had missed out on the opportunity to establish local electronics supply chain in the country earlier. It was being reversed with schemes like PLI and benefiting companies like Micromax.
He was speaking at the Convergence India Expo in New Delhi on Thursday.
Sharma said that at its peak, Micromax had only one large factory in the country. “Now, Micromax 2.0 is part of three PLI schemes with four large factories in India currently.
Founded in 2000, Micromax was known for its long battery life phones. Once a leading Indian smartphone manufacturer, Micromax could not compete with Chinese brands.
“Indian brands were doing quite well. The share of the total mobile phone segment to Indian brands was close to around 50%, which today is abysmal,” he said.
He said that local brands lost to the foreign ones due to lack of protection to the former, unlike the automotive industry.
“Our automotive industry flourished (because at policy level) we put a lot of barriers and protected Indian companies at that time, which was missing initially for our electronics industry. Anybody could come from outside, set up a shop, and do whatever they wanted to do,” he said.
Sharma, in 2017, had founded the electric bike company Revolt, which was acquired by RattanIndia in 2022.
Sharma said that each country has its own strength which leads it to innovate and suggested that India should do the same. China focused on supply chain as they were not that good in design while India is great at services, he said.
Hence, China started working on semiconductors 20 years back to now have 3,200 companies in the ecosystem.
“They (China) realized that they have to protect and build their local companies because only then you can make a nation. They do not have any Twitter, Google or Facebook. Hence, all of them were forced to innovate,” he said.
