Rahul Sharma, one of the founders of India’s smartphone giant Micromax Infomatics, has dehyphenated himself from the parent brand to launch Yu, a new smartphone venture that aims to try and do things differently. Yu has debuted in the highly competitive Indian smartphone market with Yureka, a phone that runs the Android-based Cyanogenmod operating system, which is exclusive to it in India. The phone sports a price tag of Rs 8,999, which seems pretty good when you look at the hardware specifications. The phone will be sold exclusively on Amazon.in from January with registrations starting on December 19.
“This is a completely different venture, it is a different company. The only common things are that I am a founder for both companies and that it is a 100% owned subsidiary of Micromax,” Sharma said in an interaction.
Sharma is convinced that hardware is going to plateau soon and the sole differentiator left for smartphone manufacturers will be software.
“There are two things in software. One is the user experience and the other is the services platform. Since we consider Yu as a co-creation between the company and the user, we will listen to them and give whatever customisation is demanded,” he says. “The Y in YU comes from you and the U from us.”
Sharma explains that a high level of customisation is not possible in stock Android, but is the USP of Cyanogen, which also has a huge developer community spread across the world. “That is why we chose them,” he adds.
“Services means a platform and is not just an app… It has to solve a problem for that person in Gorakhpur or Nasik. So Yu will not just be a phone, but a connected ecosystem,” he says, suggesting there could be much more than phones under the Yu brand.
But will it be tough to sell the relatively unknown Cyanogenmod OS to the Indian users? “Our youth are tech natives and would love to use this type of technology. It is just that no one has given them anything of this kind till now.”
Cyanogen’s vice-president of product development Dave Herman echoes this and says Cyanogenmod is not different from Android to that extent that it will confuse buyers. “In fact, we just enhance and refine the Android experience,” he says.
OnePlus’ One, launched in the country earlier this month, was supposed to be the first Cyanogenmod phone in India. But Micromax inked the exclusive deal with Cyanogen before that, preventing the Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus from using the OS in India. While their first batch of phones sports the Cyanogenmod and runs the OS, subsequent batches won’t.
Unlike Micromax, Yu is also thinking like the new breed of smartphone startups. It will sell its phones only through Amazon.in and will bank primarily on word of mouth and social media, instead of a huge marketing budgets. Plus, it is doing something that no other OEM in India has attempted before: Offer replacement and on-site repair for phones.
“Why should someone who has bought the phone online take it to a service centre for repairs?” asks Sharma, reflecting a new stream of thought that is hard to find among traditional brands.
He also surprised a lot of people with the pricing and added a bit of drama to the launch by announcing two probable prices before settling for the very competitive Rs 8,999. At Rs 19,999, the first price that he announced, Sharma would have stayed clear of the Micromax phones.
However, with the final pricing, he has clearly ventured into the Micromax territory. So much so that any success for Yu could come at the cost of Micromax and other brands that play the value for money card.
The new device could also be a push for Yu’s and Cyanogen’s global ambitions. Cyanogen “would love” to take the Yu price point to other geographies and it helps that Micromax already has a presence in Russia and other markets. Micromax is the second largest smartphone brand in India after Samsung.