Micromax bets on offline sale of YU phones to boost growth

NEW DELHI: “It’s time to take YU offline,” said Rahul Sharma, founder of YU Televentures and co-founder of Micromax.

NEW DELHI: “It’s time to take YU offline,” said Rahul Sharma, founder of YU Televentures and co-founder of Micromax.

HT Image

YU, owned my Micromax, started as a mobile company that would sell phones only online.

YU aimed at building an ecosystem of connected devices, offering a lot of consumer internet services, including shopping, payments and healthcare.

Sharma thought users of these services usually bought phone online. But he was proven wrong when YU phones, in a pilot project, were sold in Reliance Retail. It was a runaway success.

So Sharma is now building a pan-India distribution network. By the end of 2017, YU will be available in 50,000 outlets.

But Sharma does not plan to use Micromax’s distributors. “The two brands stand for separate things – YU is all about touching the lives of people,” he said.

In one year, more than 50% of YU’s sales is likely to come from retail stores. In 2015, two million YU phones were sold. That number will at least double with offline retail, Sharma added.

Since these devices will generate data by being connected to the internet, Sharma wants to use it to “solve complex problems of human lives.” One of that is invention of a prick-free blood sugar detection device, which Sharma’s team is working on.