With the failure of its Blackberry deal and in-house brand Zen Mobiles, Optiemus has had a turbulent last few years, and is now rebooting with a sharp focus to emerge as one of the top homegrown electronics manufacturing companies
Nitesh Gupta, director, Optiemus Electronics. Optiemus has been manufacturing handsets for the likes of LG and HTC at its Noida facility. Image: Madhu Kapparath
It looked like a smart move. “It indeed was in early 2017,” recalls Nitesh Gupta, director at Optiemus Electronics, the wholly-owned arm of Optiemus Infracom, about the time he inked an exclusive and long-term licensing deal with Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry to design, manufacture and distribute their handsets in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh in February 2017.
Optiemus, which started its journey as a retailer and distributor of Nokia handsets in 1995, grew in stature and size over the next decade. The Delhi-based company went on to add more biggies to its retail kitty such as Samsung, Plantronics and HTC, launched its own handset brand Zen Mobile in 2009, and crossed the ₹1,000-crore revenue mark in FY17.
With BlackBerry, it was set to take a bold bet. “BlackBerry was a massive opportunity,” recalls Gupta, who joined his father’s business in 2011 after completing his master’s in entrepreneurship from Nottingham University Business School in the UK. Despite the fact that BlackBerry was fast slipping into its sunset years globally in 2017, the move made ample sense to the entrepreneur, who was 25 at the time. “The brand had massive equity and recall among Indians,” reckons Gupta, who was confident of making it big with BlackBerry.
The then-two-decade-old Indian company had a lot riding on BlackBerry for a couple of reasons. First, by 2017, Chinese smartphone makers had started hammering the homegrown players. From just four percent market share in the first quarter of 2016, Xiaomi had leapfrogged to 13 percent in the first quarter of 2017, according to Counterpoint Research. During the same period, the biggest Indian player, Micromax, had slumped from 17 percent to five percent. Another Chinese warrior, Vivo, had jumped from one percent to 10 percent during the same span. The room for Indian players such as Lava, Intex, Karbonn and Zen Mobile was getting constricted.
(This story appears in the 15 July, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)