HTC, Videocon, LeEco, Spice - do you remember
these brands? And who could forget iBall, or Nokia's OK phone, the one that
came out with Hrithik Roshan? There was a time when India had dozens of
smartphone brands fighting for shelf space. Now only a handful remain. LED TVs
went through a similar boom-and-bust cycle too, honestly it's dizzying just
thinking about how many of these companies rose and fell. What were their
stories? What actually went wrong? Let's go through all of it.
Videocon: From Household Name to Bankruptcy Case
The Videocon Group ended up owing banks close to
90,000 crore rupees. At one point, their "V" logo was a fixture in
almost every Indian household, but their downfall eventually became one of
India's biggest corporate bankruptcy cases.
The brand was started by Venugopal Dhoot along
with his brothers between 1979 and 1980. In 1982, Videocon became the first
company in India to get a license to manufacture color televisions. Over the
years, they launched affordable keypad phones, feature phones, and eventually
budget Android smartphones. They also started their own SIM and network service
under the name Videocon Telecom, and even entered the DTH space.
But the family began pulling money out of the
core business and pouring it into new sectors like oil and gas, and power and
telecom. Then came the 2012 2G spectrum scam, after which the Supreme Court
cancelled 21 of their telecom licenses in one stroke. The mounting losses piled
up until the group owed banks roughly 90,000 crore rupees.
While their attention and money got tied up in
other businesses and paying off debt, the electronics and mobile market got
taken over by LG, Samsung, and various Chinese brands. In 2018, the company was
officially taken to the National Company Law Tribunal to be declared bankrupt.
Their DTH business ended up merging with Dish TV, and their telecom spectrum
had to be sold off to Airtel.
LeEco: The Company That Tried to Be Netflix,
Apple, and Tesla All at Once
LeEco, later renamed LeTV, was started by a
Chinese billionaire named Jia Yueting. It began in 2004 as a video streaming
website, essentially trying to be the Netflix of China.
In India, they launched phones like the Le1s,
Le2, and LeMax. Interestingly, LeEco removed the 3.5mm headphone jack from
their phones before Apple did, and they were also early adopters of USB Type-C
audio. Their phones had metal builds and processors that were genuinely
impressive for the price at the time. And they weren't just making phones -
they branched into budget smart TVs, smart bicycles, and even an electric car
venture called Faraday Future.
LeEco's biggest mistake was trying to become
Netflix, Apple, and Tesla all at the same time. Their business model was to
sell phones at cost price and make money back through a paid membership for
their content ecosystem. But almost nobody actually paid for their content or
videos, which meant their planned revenue stream never materialized. Returns
from their other businesses never came through either, and eventually the
company couldn't even afford to pay its own employees. The whole system
collapsed.
In India, just a year after a flashy market
entry, they suddenly laid off 85% of their staff. One of our team members,
Pranay, actually owned a LeEco phone. He took it to a service center in Mumbai
while it was still under warranty, only to find out the company had already
shut down and left. He was left stranded.
Alcatel: A Brand Caught Between France and China
Alcatel is an old, international brand with roots
in both France and China. Originally, it was part of a major French telecom
company called Alcatel-Lucent. In 2004, the French company partnered with
China's TCL Communication for its mobile division, and a few years later, TCL
bought out Alcatel's entire mobile business outright.
Alcatel later launched its "One Touch"
series, which became quite popular, and followed up with the Idol and Pop
series once Android took off. At one point, they even made Windows phones. But
once Xiaomi, Realme, and Vivo entered the market offering high performance at
low prices, Alcatel simply couldn't keep up. On top of that, getting a broken
Alcatel phone repaired was often a hassle.
TCL eventually took over responsibility for
running Alcatel, but they also got a license to manufacture BlackBerry phones
and started launching their own TCL-branded smartphones. As a result, they
started deprioritizing the Alcatel brand altogether. Because of this, Alcatel's
market share in India never crossed 1-2%, and the brand quietly exited the
Indian market.
Honor (HTech): A Comeback That Never Took Off
HTech is short for Honor Tech. In August 2023,
Madhav Sheth, the former CEO of Realme India, teamed up with PSAV Global to
launch HTech, with the vision of reviving the Chinese brand Honor in India.
Honor had exited India back in 2020 due to US sanctions.
HTech targeted the budget, mid-range, and premium
segments, launching devices like the Honor 90, X9, and the Honor 200 series.
These phones were known for their curved displays, drop-resistant screens, and
camera quality. But HTech priced these phones quite high, and at those price
points, brands like OnePlus, iQOO, and Vivo were offering better specifications
for the money. On top of that, strict Indian government rules around BIS
certification and delays around Chinese components made importing and manufacturing
extremely difficult for them.
By the end of 2024, Madhav Sheth himself had
stepped away from the brand. They had talked about investing 400 crore rupees
into a comeback and building a supply chain in India, but continuous failures
and fading hype meant their market share never crossed even 1%. A major reason
for HTech's failure was that their phones didn't even have the Play Store,
because Google had banned them, and that relationship never got repaired. A
phone with no Gmail, no Play Store, and none of Google's core services - who's
actually going to buy that?
Amazon Fire Phone: Proof That Even Amazon Can
Flop
The Amazon Fire Phone is a great example of how
even the world's biggest e-commerce company can badly flop in the mobile
market. It was a passion project of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, developed in
secrecy for years. Unlike other brands, Amazon didn't launch a whole lineup -
just a single phone, called the Fire Phone, released in July 2014.
The phone's biggest selling point was its 3D
display. It had four small cameras on the front that tracked your face and
eyes, making icons and maps appear to shift in 3D as you moved your head. It
also had a dedicated side button that let you scan real-world objects, like a
book or a shampoo bottle, and pull it up directly in the Amazon app.
Amazon was known for pricing its Kindle tablets
aggressively low, but the Fire Phone was priced directly against the top models
of the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy. It ran on Fire OS, an Android-based system,
but it had no Google Play Store, no YouTube, no Gmail, and no Google Maps. This
made downloading apps a huge pain for users, and Amazon's own app store wasn't
great either. People quickly realized the 3D feature was just a gimmick.
Just three months after launch, Amazon had to
publicly admit the phone was a massive failure. Their warehouses were sitting
on about $83 million worth of unsold phones. The entire project cost Amazon
roughly 1,000 crore rupees in direct losses.
iBall: A Different Kind of Story
iBall's story is a bit different from the others,
since they didn't start with mobile phones at all - they started with computer
accessories. Chances are you've owned an iBall mouse at some point. The brand
was founded by Anil Parshuram Puria in September 2001, in Mumbai. Back then,
mice used to have a rolling ball underneath called a trackball, which is
actually where the name "iBall" came from.
iBall deserves a lot of credit for popularizing
affordable tablets in India, particularly through their Slide series, which was
hugely popular among students and budget buyers. They later entered the mobile
market with their Andi series of budget Android smartphones, and also sold
speakers, routers, and affordable laptops.
iBall's biggest mistake was that they never
designed or manufactured their own phones. Instead, they imported cheap,
pre-made phones and tablets from China and simply slapped their own iBall
branding on them. Once Chinese brands started entering India directly and
opening their own showrooms, iBall's entire business model collapsed. Around
2014-2015, iBall's total revenue was around 1,200 crore rupees. But as sales
dropped, the company's loans and debts kept piling up, profit margins nearly
vanished, and they took a heavy hit. Today, iBall still sells computer accessories
like mice, keyboards, webcams, and sound systems.
Spice Mobile: Once India's Most Popular
Homegrown Phone Brand
Spice Mobile was, at one point, one of India's
most popular homegrown phone brands. The brand was started by B.K. Modi,
chairman of Spice Global, and his son Dilip Modi went on to grow the business
significantly further. Initially, they also ran a SIM and network service
called Spice Telecom, which was acquired by Idea Cellular in 2008. Their phone
business was first called Spice Mobile, later renamed S Mobility.
In the beginning, they mainly made keypad-based
feature phones and played a major role in popularizing affordable dual-SIM
phones with long battery life in India. As touchscreens became mainstream, they
launched the Spice Stellar series. In 2014, when Google launched its Android
One program aimed at affordable, high-quality smartphones, Spice was one of
just three brands Google selected for the program, and they launched the Dream
Uno phone as part of it.
But the brand's downfall came largely because
Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo entered India around 2014-2015. Then, once Jio arrived,
India suddenly needed affordable 4G and VoLTE phones in massive numbers, and
homegrown brands like Spice, Micromax, and Karbonn simply couldn't upgrade to
4G fast enough. In just one quarter of 2014 alone, the company posted a net
loss of around 223 crore rupees. They eventually shut down their main
manufacturing unit in Himachal Pradesh.
After exiting the phone business, they shifted
focus to digital finance. Today, that same company operates as DiGiSPICE
Technologies and Spice Money, providing digital banking and payment services,
like Aadhaar-based cash withdrawals, to people in villages and smaller towns
across India.
LG: The Innovator That Couldn't Find Its Direction
LG is a large, long-established South Korean
multinational company. In India, they operated as LG Electronics and once had
their own large manufacturing plant. In the early 2000s, around the time
Reliance's mobile boom hit India, LG's keypad phones held a strong presence in
the market, with their G-series and V-series being especially popular.
LG deserves credit for a lot of firsts: the
ultra-wide camera you see in phones today was first introduced by LG. They also
made some of the best flip phones and foldable-screen phones of their time, and
even experimented with self-healing back panels that could repair small
scratches on their own. Their phones were genuinely well-built.
The problem was a lack of clear direction. Unlike
Samsung, which had a clear structure with one flagship line alongside a wide
range of mid-range and budget phones, LG never quite settled on a consistent
strategy. This led to mounting losses in their smartphone division over time,
and they eventually had to shut down the entire mobile phone segment
altogether. In total, LG's mobile business racked up about $4.5 billion,
roughly 33,000 crore rupees, in losses.
BlackBerry: Undone by Its Own Overconfidence
BlackBerry was once the undisputed king of the
mobile world. From top business executives to Hollywood stars, even former US
President Barack Obama was famously seen with one - it was practically a status
symbol. The brand was created by a Canadian company called Research In Motion
(RIM), founded by Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin. Jim Balsillie later joined as
co-CEO and helped scale the company globally. Eventually, the company renamed
itself from RIM to BlackBerry.
BlackBerry phones were known for their physical
QWERTY keyboards instead of touchscreens, along with a trackball or trackpad in
the middle that made navigation easy. Long before WhatsApp existed, they had
their own private messaging app called BBM, which was massively popular. Models
like the Curve, Bold, and the PS series sold like crazy worldwide, and the
phones were especially known for their strong security.
BlackBerry's downfall wasn't caused by outside
competition so much as its own overconfidence. When Apple launched the first
iPhone in 2007, BlackBerry's leadership actually mocked it, convinced that
nobody would ever give up a physical keyboard to type on a touchscreen. By the
time they realized their mistake, iPhone and Android had already eaten up the
market.
BlackBerry's entire operating system was designed
around office work and email. But once people wanted to play games, watch
YouTube, and use all kinds of new apps on their phones, BlackBerry's app store
felt completely barren by comparison. They also kept BBM exclusive to their own
devices for far too long, and in the meantime, WhatsApp came along and completely
destroyed BBM's relevance.
Between 2009 and 2010, BlackBerry held roughly
20% of the global smartphone market. But once smartphones truly took over,
their sales collapsed so badly that their market share eventually dropped to
essentially zero. They tried to re-enter the touchscreen market with the
BlackBerry Z10 in 2013, but it flopped so badly that around $1 billion, roughly
8,000 crore rupees, worth of unsold phones piled up in their warehouses.
Eventually, BlackBerry stopped making phones
altogether, selling its name and license first to TCL (the same company behind
Alcatel), and later to a company called Onward Mobility. Neither company
managed to successfully sell BlackBerry-branded phones after that. Finally, in
January 2022, BlackBerry officially shut down software and server support for
its old phones for good.
HTC: The Android Pioneer That Faded Away
HTC is a brand that brings back a lot of old
memories. At one point, HTC was considered the leader of Android smartphones,
since they built the very first Android phone in the world. Today, the brand
has almost completely disappeared from the mobile market.
HTC is a Taiwanese company, founded in 1997 by
Cher Wang and Peter Chou. Its full name was High Tech Computer Corporation. In
its early days, HTC manufactured touchscreen computers and phones for major
companies like HP, Dell, and O2. Later, they started selling phones under their
own brand name.
Their HTC One series, including the M7 and M8,
are still considered among the most beautifully designed phones in mobile
history, and the unibody metal design you see in phones today was something HTC
pioneered. While Samsung and Apple were pouring enormous budgets into
advertising and marketing, HTC had a comparatively tiny marketing budget, yet
people loved their phones enough to keep coming back and buying them anyway.
HTC also introduced UltraPixel camera technology, a concept that's still used
in phones today. Not many people know this, but in 2011, HTC was actually the
number one smartphone brand in the US, holding a 24% market share.
In my view, HTC's biggest challenge came from a
shift in strategy. When HTC started out, their entire focus was on product
development. But in 2011, seeing how much money was coming in, they decided to
change strategy and pour serious money into marketing to compete directly with
Samsung and Apple. By 2013, they had spent close to $1 billion on marketing
alone. HTC stayed focused purely on the premium segment, and as competition
intensified, they started facing major losses, eventually forcing them to shut
the business down.
The Bigger Picture
The tech industry is one of the most brutal
industries out there, and building a lasting brand within it might be the
hardest part of all, since every new innovation forces you to keep catching up
or risk falling behind. That's exactly what happened to so many of the brands
we've talked about here - from Videocon and LeEco to BlackBerry and HTC, so
many companies that were once at the very top ended up falling all the way down
to zero. But it's worth remembering: the brands that are still thriving and
pushing boundaries today deserve even more respect for it. Hopefully, the
brands still standing keep building the next big things ahead.
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