The Chain Seller

Rohin Dharmakumar
Updated: Jan 6, 2012 01:09:37 PM UTC

On a surprisingly warm afternoon early-December afternoon in Bangalore, I land up at the offices of Karbonn Mobiles to meet its chairman, Sudhir Hasija.

I look around the narrow street where it's supposed to be, and find nothing but a small ground floor office in an unmarked building. Above it there's an unremarkable board with Karbonn's logo but it looks so much like an afterthought that I wonder if I had mixed up the address and landed up somehow at one of the company's distribution centers.

I'm wrong. The nondescript building is the headquarters of India's fourth largest mobile phone maker by volume, as per Gartner. That was my first surprise of the day.

After a wait, I'm shown in to Hasija's cabin. We start talking but are interrupted within minutes by his phone. It's someone with an order, and judging by the fact that he's calling the chairman of the company, must be a fairly large one.

Hasija holds his phone to his ear with one hand and with his other, opens up a tall notebook filled with orders. He negotiates with the caller on the best price and then notes it down duly in the notebook across 5 or 6 ruled columns.

The chairman of Rs.1200 crore company noting down orders in a notebook is my second surprise of the day.

The call over, Hasija whips out a cigarette and starts smoking. No explanation or excuse is offered. Being an enclosed cabin, smoke surrounds us.

He takes out a phone from the drawer in his desk and pushes it across the table to me and his PR rep. He's got an impish smile on his face.

"What do you think of it?"

It's a pretty standard looking touchscreen phone.

"Er, it's nice," I venture.

Without a word he takes it back, but under the table into his lap. He fiddles around with it for a few seconds and then slides it back out again towards us.

This time its a standard candybar phone with a numeric keypad.

"Is it the same phone?" I ask him.

In reply he takes it back and slides out keypad...and voila! It's back to a touchscreen.

Nifty trick, but does it really move phones by the hundreds of thousands?

How did he manage the remarkable feat of beating Micromax to become the number four player in a competitive market like India, I ask him.

Hasija smiles, then tells me that his company actually has been number three in the market (after Nokia and Samsung) since April 2011. "I'm selling around 8.5 lakh phones per month right now which should increase to nearly 1 million by January," he says.

The mobile market in India is crazy, competitive with new models and lower prices almost every week. How has he managed this?

Do Unto Others Hasija lights another cigarette, takes a couple of puffs, and then says, "We're more transparent with distributors".

That's it? What does that even mean?

"You see I used to be a Samsung distributor once, and before that a Nokia distributor. The way it worked was this: the company would pressurize its national distributors who in turn would pressurize their regional distributors who would finally pressurize dealers."

As a result, says Hasija, dealers would often be left holding the baby for no fault of theirs.

"Take the example of a price drop. Usually the company would sell its stock at full price just before the drop, in order to meet its monthly targets. As a result the dealers are left holding expensive stocks while the MRPs have been dropped by the company."

Because Hasija felt that pain, he claims to be more sensitive towards inflicting it on his own distributors. So he today offers a 15-day 'price guarantee' to his distributors to protect them from such incidents.

I'm not convinced, because its sounds too vague to power such hard growth numbers.

But Hasija has moved on to a new phone on his desk. This one has a user interface that looks exactly like Android, including the apps.

"So its an Android phone?" I ask him.

No, he says. "We call it the Tornado and it copies Android's look, skins, apps totally."

I'm flabbergasted. The UI felt zippier than the real Android UI on my year old Google Nexus One.

I want to ask Hasija if its even legal? But he's already switched tracks in his mind to real Androids.

2012 is going to be about Android smartphones for us. We launched our first Android, the A1, at Rs.6500 two months back. Next month we'll launch three more."

He's already on to his third cigarette.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.

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