u/Donnie_Indo

Watched the MrWhoseTheBoss AI+ video this week. Rebadged chinese hardware, chinese apps on a phone that literally boots up saying "your data stays in India", and so on.

But the thing that video accidentally does is teach you how "made in india" phones actually work. The ODM ladder. Chinese companies design and build, Indian companies slap their name on it. AI+ just did it badly with a cheap ODM and got caught lying.

but once you understand that ladder, point it upward and you would probably find Micromax

Remember Micromax? Everyone thinks they died years ago. They didn't. The parent company is very much alive and about to IPO for around $2.5 billion.

Micromax is back - but not as the phone brand you remember. the parent company is now one of the biggest smartphone manufacturers in the country. They make phones for Oppo, tabs for One Plus. revenue went from ₹620 crore to ₹6,200 crore in a single year. 10x.

Management guidance for this year is ₹15,000 crore. they're prepping an IPO at around $2.5 billion. Goldman Sachs and Kotak on the deal.

this is not a small story.

Now here's the thing. when you start asking how a company goes from 620 crore to 6200 crore in twelve months, the answer is not what you'd expect. and when you keep pulling that thread, what you end up finding out about "Make in India" in smartphones is genuinely uncomfortable. Not in the AI+ way where someone's lying. worse. Because this is all out in the open and yet is hiding in plains sight.

What i ultimately realized after digging through filings for about a month is that China has way more to gain from Make in India than most people understand. but explaining the how is where it gets long.

I spent close to 200 hours on this. Went through the actual filings, the policy documents, the subsidy math, all of it.

Ended up making a full video before the AI+ drama even started. its on my profile if you want the whole thing.

But genuinely, even if you don't watch it, just look at those revenue numbers and ask yourself how that happens in one year.

The answer tells you everything about where indian manufacturing actually is right now.

That PK prediction clip is everywhere right now and people are acting like it explains the entire TVK win.

But six months before calling Tamil Nadu, Prashant Kishor’s own party in Bihar contested 239 seats and literally won zero. Some candidates even lost to NOTA.

So what changed in Tamil Nadu?

Simple: Vijay already had the machine.

People are talking about TVK like it suddenly appeared in 2024. Vijay Makkal Iyakkam had been active since 2009 -> local clubs, welfare activities, school supply drives, blood camps, all that stuff. By 2021 they were already contesting local body elections and apparently won 115 out of 169 seats. That’s insane for something that wasn’t even a proper political party yet.

And honestly, if celebrity alone was enough, Rajinikanth, Kamal Haasan and Vijayakanth would’ve all succeeded too. They didn’t.

I think four things came together at the same time:

• Stalin openly pushing Udhayanidhi right after a huge LS win
• AIADMK joining NDA and losing its old positioning
• Vijay already having a ground network ready
• PK correctly reading the moment and timing the entry

People are treating PK like he created support from nothing. I don’t think that’s true.

He amplified something that already existed.

You can be the best strategist in the world, but if there’s no base on the ground, nothing happens. Bihar itself proved that.

I made a detailed video breaking all this down here if anyone’s interested:

https://youtu.be/DLaE0iBuu0c