Growth vs profitability - MIVI’s Midhula Devabhaktuni on what is more important

DATAMATIXX Summit and Awards 2023, the annual industry event focused on data and digital, was held on July 28, 2023 at Sahara Star Mumbai. Organised by Adgully, the theme for the event this year was ‘Unlocking Business Growth with AI & Data Performance’, with a focus on the significant impact of data-driven strategies and artificial intelligence on business growth and performance.

There are several viewpoints around whether an organisation should focus on growth or on profitability. Delivering her keynote address virtually, Midhula Devabhaktuni, Co-Founder & CMO, MIVI, spoke about how her organisation has been achieving a successful balance between the two.

Talking about how they work at MIVI, Devabhaktuni said, “MIVI was set up in 2016, and we have been a profitable company since day one. While we were also very particular about growth, we have grown at a CAGR of around 75% year on year since then.”

Elaborating further, she said, “MIVI is a consumer electronics brand, we are a pioneering audio brand to be very precise and we are in a segment where lifetime value or the return rate of a customer is quite low. Selling at a loss in a segment where the LTD is quite low and there is not a lot of retention never made sense for us, so we always made sure we were a profitable brand.”

Devabhaktuni added that there is a huge question on how do we grow in this competitive market. She noted, “The market is growing fast and the customers’ interest changes beyond daily. We focused on four different factors for that, the first one being product differentiation. We’ve identified what it is that we can offer the customer that is not existing in the market today, that is better than what is in the market today. So, we always keep coming up with how can we make a product that is differentiated from the market, which would allow us to keep our profits while still growing at a very fast pace.”

Continuing further, he added, “Then there is quality differentiation, MIVI was started and continues to operate with the mission to make premium electronics for the needs of the Indian consumer. So, in order to differentiate that we've gone ahead and started our own manufacturing in India to the first audio company to start manufacturing in India, and this helps us control the quality of the product that goes to the customer and also helps our team to take all the learnings of our previous products and develop a product that is better than before.”

“Another factor is that we rely on service differentiation. India is a market that is not great on service. We’ve identified this early on, and have come up with this policy again, first in our category, to be a one year warranty replacement policy, no questions asked,” Devabhaktuni concluded.