Rahul Sharma

Rahul started his address with a brief introductory note about his company and moved on to enthrall the audience with his recollection of their transformational journey from being an e-commerce startup to becoming the third largest mobile handset seller in India.

Sharma boasts of two undergraduate degrees: Mechanical Engineering from Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University, and Bachelors in Commerce from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada

MICROMAX INFORMATICS PVT. LTD.

Rahul Sharma started Micromax in 2000, along with three friends Vikas Jain, Sumeet Arora, Rajesh Aggarwal. It all started as an IT software company that also distributed Nokia phones, but Sharma's winning idea of making cheap phones with a long-lasting battery life brought Micromax to the forefront of mobile phones in India.

Fortune magazine listed Sharma in their list of the most influential young people in business under 40 years of age. Under Sharma, the company's sales have grown from $ 10,000 to $ 36 million.

They developed their own hardware and soon found a partner in the form of Bharti Airtel. Their first assignment was the installation of payphones in the rough terrain of Jammu and Kashmir. They approached the assignment with the belief that if the payphones could work in such hostile environments, they could work anywhere in India. Micromax lived up to their expectations and completed the project successfully.

The greatest inspiration for Micromax to enter the mobile phone manufacturing business came from a chance encounter that Rahul had with a payphone operator who was doing business in an area where there was no electricity and poor network coverage, deep in interior West Bengal. Rahul quickly identified that the problems being faced by that payphone operator were pretty much the same as those troubling the regular and more affluent customers, i.e., if the phones had to be charged often, there was no point in having them.