Micromax is going to shut down Yu – a brand it had launched in 2014 specifically for consumers who buy smartphones online and also take on the dominance of Chinese players in online space. This has been revealed by a news report of TeleAnalysis.
Quoting sources, some current employees and few ex-employees of the firm, TeleAnalysis reported, “Micromax has already discontinued YU Mobiles. The manpower and other units of YU have been merged into the parent company.”
The report further added, “YU Mobiles did not offer any replies to our queries on the discontinuation of the smartphone brand, and Rahul Sharma’s ( Co- Founder Micromax) response was not convincing.”
In the last three years, Micromax has launched four Yu smartphones but it has been almost a year since they have not launched a new smartphone. Yunicorn was the last smartphone launched under the Yu Brand in May 2016.
On old smartphone inventory, the report said, “ Some devices are still available in the market to be sold but customers are not buying the YU branded phones as the operating system that runs on these devices – CyanogenMod – has been closed and stopped offering any more services or updates since December last year.”
The report also suggest that launching the Yu Brand was not a unanimous decisions as one of the members of decision-making body at Micromax on condition of anonymity said, “It was a wrong and whimsical decision at the first place and none of the founding members of Micromax, except Rahul Sharma was in favour of carving out another brand from Micromax.”
Off late, the torch bearer of Indian handset players has been getting negative publicity. A few days back Micromax had launched its latest smartphone Dual 5 in India for Rs 24,999. It is a value for money smartphone but the problem was it has not been made from scratch by the Micromax as claimed earlier at a closed-door briefing.
When The Mobile Indian had probed the issue we came top know, it is a reworked (slightly) and rebranded version of the Qiku 360 Q5 which has not been launched in India.
Sources at China’s Qiku, who didn’t want to be named, had said to us That Micromax Dual 5 is indeed a rebranded version of their 360 Q5 and as Qiku didn’t have any plans of launching 360 Q5 in India and when Micromax showed interest in the device they were more than willing to offer it to them.