I’m sure that most of you have heard of a company called “Yu”, a rather new company which released their first handset back in December in collaboration with Cyanogen. The device’s name is Yu Yureka, and it is powered by Cyanogen OS. As a side not, Yu is a subsidiary of Micromax, a far more known brand in India. Anyhow, the Yureka handset is a very affordable piece of technology which comes sporting really decent specifications. The device is available in India only at the moment, and keeps on getting sold out on Amazon India.
We won’t be getting too much into its specs, but will mention some. The Yureka features a 5.5-inch 720p display along with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. 13 and 5-megapixel cameras are also a part of the package, and this device is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615 64-bit octa-core processor and costs Rs. 8,999 ($142) in India, which is a really affordable price. If you’d like to get more info regarding the handset itself, visit our announcement article. We’re not here to talk about the device itself, but about this company. Fonearena managed to get an interview with the co-founder and CEO of Yu, Rahul Sharma. We’ll try to give you the bulletpoints of this interview, tell you what Yu’s CEO spoke about, so, let’s get started, shall we.
First and foremost, Yu’s CEO was asked about Yureka’s availability, he admitted that the company underestimated the demand for the handset, and that they’re trying to expand their production chain in order to offer more units to consumers. He also said that Yureka will hardly be available in open sale anytime soon, they just don’t have such a production capacity just yet. Mr. Sharma wanted to clear up the relationship between Micromax and Yu by stating that Yu is a Micromax subsidiary, but that the only connection between the two companies is himself. He said that Yu is led by a completely separate team and that there’s no real business connection between the two companies.
“For me, the next revolution is coming from software and services. Not hardware. That’s what we are working on and we have realized that for us to do that we should first take control over the operating system. There were two options for us – one is to making a new ROM from scratch or partner with someone who has one of the best solutions across the world,” said Rahul Sharma, and added the following: “We valuated a lot of solutions, but found Cyanogen to be the best and it’s a fantastic product. So, we decided to go ahead with them. And, I call it ‘Android on Steroid’ because it provides so many sanities. We wanted to target tech natives and to address these people we had to come up with a new concept.” So, he basically wants to emphasize the software and services here, that those are the most important things to Yu as a company.
Mr. Sharma went on to explain the name of the company, he says that ‘Y’ stands for ‘you’ and ‘U’ for ‘us’, it’s kind of symbolic as you can see. The company’s co-founder also said that Yureka won’t reach retail stores, that it will remain available online, by Amazon. He said that you never know what comes next, but that they currently have no plans to partners with any other retailers or anything of the sort. It was also said that they already consider Yureka to be a premium phone because it runs great, and that’s the most important thing, user experience. Mr. Sharma admitted that the company is considering entering the wearables market, so that’s something that we might see in the future.
When asked about international availability, he said the following: “Right now, we are ramping our supplies and it’s evident. You can see people cheering us and also we are aware that there are still quite a few disappointed fans. The moment we are able to come in terms of demand in India, believe me we will enter other markets. Yureka is a future ready product and it is second to none. It’s been quite some time since we started making phones and we know what works best. So, with our experience we will enter a new market when we feel that the time is right,” which basically means that we’ll see Yureka offered in other markets in due time, and he additionally admitted that he welcomes competition, while saying that’s a perfectly normal thing and part of every market.
That’s basically it. Yu’s CEO shared his look on things in this interview, and kind of revealed where the company is heading. It seems like they’re doing more than fine at the moment, and that we can expect them to dabble in wearables in the future.