Does Vivo have a future in India?

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₹71,000 crore to China, the ED alleged. Several arrests have been made and a court room drama is expected soon. We will return to the charges in a bit.

But currently, a larger question looms. Will the probe and the legal battles dent the smartphone maker’s brilliant run in India? How did the company script such a success story in the first place? The chief executive officers (CEOs) of Vivo India, all foreign nationals, have had very short stints. Between 2014 and now, five chief executive officers (CEOs) have served the company—Ye Liao (2014); Alex Feng (2015); Kent Cheng (2016); Jerome Chen (2019) and Hong Xuquan (2021/22).

Hong Xuquan is an interim CEO. He was taken into custody by ED in December and then released on bail. Interestingly, the frequent changes at the top did not disrupt the momentum of the company’s sales.

Vivo entered India at an opportune time. BlackBerry devices, a rage in the corporate world for many years, were on its last legs. Nokia was on a steady decline.

Amazon had entered India and the competition with Flipkart, India’s home-grown e-tailing platform, had intensified. That opened up cheaper channels to sell phones. But Vivo didn’t want to be just an online-only brand.

It pushed offline sales aggressively with the belief that India was a strategic market, second in importance after the home market of China. In 2017, one of the writers of this story, drove down from Chennai airport to Puducherry. The route was a sea of blue (Vivo) and green (Oppo) signboards.

Oppo is yet another Chinese electronics manufacturer that grew fast in India. The focus on the offline market worked since the competition—the likes of Xiaomi and Samsung—were moving towards online platforms. The brick-and-mortar retail