Micromax Intends to Domestically Manufacture All its Phones by 2018

By Abhishek Joshi Last updated Dec 18, 2015

India’s leading handset maker, Micromax, has been gaining a lot of momentum recently and is undoubtedly one of India’s best smartphone manufacturer. With a sub-brand ‘YU Televentures’ under it, Micromax is hoping to capture the market from high end players in the industry.

Currently, majority of the Micromax and Yu handsets are manufactured in China, where labour costs are low and suppliers are plenty. Some of these phones only assembled in India. In early 2014, Micromax had started manufacturing some of their phones in the country, starting from Uttarakhand and planned to expand across different states.

Things are about to change now drastically. With the ‘Make in India’ campaign on full swing, Micromax plans to shift its base from China to India completely by 2018. This means that from 2018 onwards, the phones will be fully manufactured and assembled locally, without any import of raw materials required for manufacturing process. This has come as a result of increasing manufacturing and labour costs in China and the increase in supplier network in India.

Rahul Sharma, Co-Founder of Micromax Informatics, commented on the positive move, “In the next 24 months 100 percent will be here. There was no ecosystem in India. Slowly, slowly we are attracting one,” he told Reuters in an interview this week. “In terms of manpower, India is far cheaper (than China).” Sharma also mentioned that a little less than two-third of the phones are assembled in India, but from 2018 all phones will be made in India.

This sounds like a terrible news for China, with a major handset maker withdrawing its manufacturing business from the market, however this is probably the most awaited news for us. Micromax’s move to manufacturing domestically is sure to generate huge employment locally and at the same time will help keep money within India.

This move will also give a boost to the low-cost smartphone segments since phones could become slightly cheaper and we could expect better customer service. Micromax will have full autonomy sourcing the parts now and we can expect much better quality as compared to Chinese products. Narendra Modi surely is working towards ‘Make in India’ and we can see the number of large organisations following the trend.

Here are some of the other Smartphone manufacturers who plans to move their Smartphone manufacturing to India