Yeah the company that has been out of China for over a decade (someone tried to renter years ago but idea was killed by higherups) is worse than the company that paid the Chinese government $300B to build out their manufacturing for the pleasure of selling phones there.
LOL you can find lots of small companies in China you have never heard of that make (better) phones and ships to dozens of countries. Nothing isn't any better than those companies other than marketing.
It is even worse than that. If I was an Android user I'd probably think twice before buying and new Chinese phone. Today it is Huawai, tomorrow some other Chinese manufacturer. Even if this kind of thinking is unfounded, it will have chilling effect on Chinese phone sales overall.
It's not 'China'. It's new competitors that blew them out of the water, like Apple and Samsung did to Nokia, for the reasons I listed in my previous comment.
Yeah, China today makes world class products. I started buying Chinese smartphones, they work great, doesn't come with much crapware and are super cheap per performance. I don't see the point in paying extra for a western company to take basically the same phone, put a brand on it and crap in it.
eh? they build phones in China - the other side of the world with a massive language and culture barrier with the sole purpose of saving money - how are they NOT thinking about profit !!!
This may be the first company in China to be innovating instead of working on the Hiphone 6. Regardless, they will never be taken seriously because Chinese companies reputations are already destroyed.
All i'm getting from China is cheap disposable garbage. The rest is made in the West and merely packaged in China, because robots have not been developed enough to put phone in box on their own, and nobody wants to do this job.
I have the impression that their advertising and cloud businesses are just not welcome in China, and if that's correct then it's all practicality and no ethics involved.
All the market analyst comments I've read about moving manufacturing of phones focused on cost and supply chain reliability with no mention of ethics either.
Yes, they are capable of producing good quality stuff, but they have built a reputation over decades for not doing so, and that won't go away overnight. Especially given that quick-buck-ism is still a poison surging through every Chinese company, just waiting to mess everything up. Just look what happened with Huawei when they got a contract from none other than Google. They basically confirmed the stereotype and set Chinese phone manufacturers back 5 years of reputation cultivation, at least.
Most of the people buying Chinese phones live in the developing countries barely earning $300-$400 a month.
They could stick it to the man by buying the latest iPhone/Pixel that protects their privacy and at the same time takes a strong political stance against a shitty regime, but they have other more pressing and immediate issues to deal with.
again, I don't see how you can draw a comparison between cheap Chinese manufacturers and an SV backed startup. Can you imagine the VC pitch for that? "We want to raise capital so we can make low-margin phones and that Chinese manufacturers can easily undercut".
Chinese manufacturers have more capital and have easier ways to monetize than a small startup. For that matter, Name a Cheap Chinese manufacturer that has been able to break through in the US market? No chinese phone manufacturer has more than 8% of the market in the US.
Essential took their shot at trying to make a value-chain leap. They failed. That's okay. Life moves on, their engineers will be okay, and they'll get more opportunities in the future - but at least they took their shot.
I must say that the whole situation is very disappointing. While western companies have been folding, China has a very active smartphone ecosystem with multiple manufacturers of phones and many different providers of services, including app stores. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?
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