Billion-dollar team: How Micromax is gearing up to touch $1-bn mark
On March 31, the four co-founders and CEODeepak Mehrotra, tossed up a rather unique challenge to two of Micromax's business heads. Ajay Sharma of the smart phone division and Khaja Muzaffarullah of feature phones were to rake in Rs 50 crore in revenues on Day One of the new fiscal.
All Fool's Day turned out to be a full working day and since banks were closed that day, on April 2, the collections for that day stood at a whopping Rs 50 crore-plus! A backdrop to this event: on March 31, 2013, the Micromaxlogged in a record Rs 3,168 crore in sales revenues for the financial year 2012-13. It was more than a 150% spike over the Rs 1,486 crore sales turnover it registered the previous fiscal.
Along with a sense of disbelief, came a determination to clock a billion dollars in record time. And that's what nudged co-founder and chief product officer Rahul Sharma to raise the bar the subsequent evening over cocktails and dinner. While the corporate office was celebrating a new high, Rahul threw in a fresh target - Rs 2,000 crore revenues in a quarter, in FY 2013-14. In other words, he wanted to attempt garnering 63.1% of the company's record Rs 3,168 crore annual turnover in just three months.
The next day, an email went out from Mehrotra's office to that effect and the whole buzz of the company now veered around WQ2K (which quarter 2000?). With half the month gone, a second round of meetings was called with the co-founders and functional heads to brainstorm on the feasibility of WQ2K. The decision that emerged was to collar Rs 2,000 crore in revenues in the very first quarter of the current fiscal. So the rallying cry in the group changed from WQ2K to FQ2K (first quarter 2000), which Mehrotra jovially claims is modeled around the FCUK uber-brand campaign.
Today, Micromax is trending at revenues of Rs 450 crore-plus a month. That makes a sweet Rs 1,350 crore quarter-on-quarter. So the challenge really is to add another Rs 650 crore on the quarterly turnover by sprucing up the product and process act to get near the $1 billion mark, and end the year at an even higher trajectory.
The new resolve is a far cry from 2011-12 when the device maker was floundering, to say the least. It lost its dominance in the dual SIM phone segment as its share nosedived from 13% in 2010 to 8% in 2011, according to Cyber Media Research. Overall sales revenues dipped from Rs 2,448 crore in 2010-11 to Rs 1,486 crore in 2011-12.
Along with a sense of disbelief, came a determination to clock a billion dollars in record time. And that's what nudged co-founder and chief product officer Rahul Sharma to raise the bar the subsequent evening over cocktails and dinner. While the corporate office was celebrating a new high, Rahul threw in a fresh target - Rs 2,000 crore revenues in a quarter, in FY 2013-14. In other words, he wanted to attempt garnering 63.1% of the company's record Rs 3,168 crore annual turnover in just three months.
The next day, an email went out from Mehrotra's office to that effect and the whole buzz of the company now veered around WQ2K (which quarter 2000?). With half the month gone, a second round of meetings was called with the co-founders and functional heads to brainstorm on the feasibility of WQ2K. The decision that emerged was to collar Rs 2,000 crore in revenues in the very first quarter of the current fiscal. So the rallying cry in the group changed from WQ2K to FQ2K (first quarter 2000), which Mehrotra jovially claims is modeled around the FCUK uber-brand campaign.
Today, Micromax is trending at revenues of Rs 450 crore-plus a month. That makes a sweet Rs 1,350 crore quarter-on-quarter. So the challenge really is to add another Rs 650 crore on the quarterly turnover by sprucing up the product and process act to get near the $1 billion mark, and end the year at an even higher trajectory.
The new resolve is a far cry from 2011-12 when the device maker was floundering, to say the least. It lost its dominance in the dual SIM phone segment as its share nosedived from 13% in 2010 to 8% in 2011, according to Cyber Media Research. Overall sales revenues dipped from Rs 2,448 crore in 2010-11 to Rs 1,486 crore in 2011-12.
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