India’s leading local handset maker Micromax will make its foray into the Chinese market, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Co-founder Vikas Jain was at the Rise conference in Hong Kong, where he said that the comany is looking to become the fifth-largest smartphone maker in the world by 2020:
The company aims to become the world’s fifth-largest smartphone maker by number of phones sold by 2020, and can’t do that without access to Chinese consumers and more cash from a public offering or private investors, said Micromax co-founder Vikas Jain at the Rise technology conference in Hong Kong.
The company plans to generate cash to fund the acquisition of companies that will help Micromax build a network of services to help its phones stand out amongst competitors. “The company can’t do that without more cash coming in,” Mr. Jain said.
Attaining that target may turn out to be problematic for Micromax, as the vendor has been steadily losing ground in the country to Chinese manufacturers and Samsung. A spate of lacklustre launches, combined with an inability to update any of its handsets to Marshmallow has waned consumer interest in the brand.
Combine that with a fiercely competitive market that fields the likes of Lenovo, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi, and it suddenly looks like a Herculean effort for a vendor that sells just over one million handsets a month.