Micromax Appoints Deepak Mehrotra as CEO

Homegrown mobile handset company Micromax Informatics Ltd has made major top management changes by appointing Deepak Mehrotra as the new chief executive officer besides hiring other senior people from Sony Ericson and HTC to lead its smartphone and feature phone business units.

Till date, privately held Micromax did not have a CEO although Rajesh Agarwal, one of its co-promoters, was serving as the managing director. The addition of the senior team will, therefore, provide a professional touch to the top management.

Earlier, Mehrotra was working as an operations director (mobility business) with telecom services giant Bharti Airtel. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was handling seven telecom circles with revenue of approximately Rs 16,000 crore. He had also served as a regional vice-president at Coca-Cola India and was regional sales manager at Asian Paints. Mehrotra holds an engineering degree from IIT Roorkee and did his MBA from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies.

In addition, Micromax has also carved out two separate divisions. While the feature phone division will be led by Khaja Muzaffarullah (who joins from Sony Ericsson), the smartphone division will be headed by Ajay Sharma (former country head for HTC in India).

Micromax, a key player in the feature phone segment, is now eyeing a share of the smartphone segment that is dominated by multinational brands such as Samsung, BlackBerry, HTC, Nokia and Apple, among others.

"The new team brings with them wealth of experience by virtue of their long-standing association with and in-depth understanding of the overall mobility market globally," said Rahul Sharma, executive director of Micromax, while commenting on the new appointments.

Micromax, backed by various institutional investors like TA Associates and Sequoia Capital, had decided to postpone its planned public issue earlier this year due to weak market scenario.