India’s Micromax to shift phone assembly from China to home

Indian phone-maker Micromax is looking to put the ‘home’ into ‘homegrown’ and is now testing out manufacturing its own smartphones in India. Up until now, India’s second biggest Android device maker has been outsourcing this work to China.

Micromax co-founder Rahul Sharma explained to Indian media:

We have a plant in Rudrapur and have already started assembling of phones on trial basis there. It will be commercially launched in the first quarter of next year.

Micromax’s current line-up of feature phones and smartphone is made by Foxconn, the Taiwanese OEM that does most of its manufacturing in mainland China.

The new Micromax plant has 400 workers. It’s not clear if Foxconn will be kept on as a partner as Micromax seeks to grow its sales volume. After strong growth in India, the company is looking at Russia in the first stage of expansion to Europe and beyond.

The Indian phone-maker hit $5 billion in sales revenue last year and is aiming at doubling that to $10 billion in 2013.

Samsung is India’s top phone brand – for now.

(Source: The Hindu)

(Editing by Terence Lee)