Micromax axes Yu Televentures
The online-only brand from Micromax failed to develop a proper roadmap for its Cyanogenmod based products.
In what comes as an expected development, Micromax’s Yu Televentures is in the process to pull down its shutters. The sole venture of Micromax’s founder Rahul Sharma has not been able to devise a proper roadmap for the company’s future operations, resulting in the suspension of plans to operate in the smartphone market.
According to sources from TeleAnalysis, the company has already suspended operations of Yu Televentures. Yu’s resources and manpower have been merged with Micromax, which itself isn’t doing great in the Indian smartphone arena. It has been also reported that leftover stocks of Yu smartphones are yet to be sold, post which the company might announce the decision officially.
The Yu smartphones ran the Cyanogemod operating system, which was based on Android. After Cyanogenmod shut down its operations, the phones stopped receiving software updates, letting its potential customers switch to other Chinese brands for better value.
Yu also promised to be an online-only brand and provide a connected ecosystem of smart devices as well. The company’s first smartphone – the Yureka was launched in January 2015 with the promise to be an online-only brand. But YU went back to traditional offline stores with its partnership with Reliance Retail after just a year.
On connected ecosystem front, the company could not make any mark. The company launched smart accessory products like YUfit and HealthYu that could monitor biological activities like running, heartbeat, blood pressure and more. However, they could not get enough customers for those products. They also launched the YUpix portable printer and a power bank later.
The company was supposed to release their next smartphone after the Yu Yunicorn last October. But the dates were pushed to the end of the year before finally going silent on releasing the Yu product. It was expected that Yu Televentures could be adopting the stock Android platform for its devices but there were no hints of the same from the company.
Yu Televentures got a fair amount of attention from the consumers when it launched its first smartphone in 2015. The products were hailed for offering incredible value for money with class-leading specifications, a highly customisable operating system and decent build quality for a very low price. The arrival of Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo crippled Yu as well as its parent company, which has dropped out of the top 5 smartphone makers in the last quarter.
It remains to be seen if Micromax can utilise Yu’s resources and manpower to gain its former glory in the smartphone market.