By LU Keyan
In China, the smartphone market has been cornered by Apple, Huawei and Xiaomi, but overseas, new brands are trying their luck.
As former president of Gionee, YU Lei has plenty of experience as a smartphone manufacturer. Gionee went bust in 2018.
Yu founded a new brand FreeYond. The first model will be ready by the end of this month, priced at about US$100 (670 yuan), the first FreeYond phone is targeting the Latin American market.
All six founders of FreeYond are former executives of Gionee. Yu plans to start with asset-light budget phones so that “the company will survive,” and climb up to the higher-end, culminating, like so many tech dreams today, in the electric car market.
Another smartphone brand Nothing, founded by OnePlus’ PEI Yu a year ago, released its first model last month. Nothing 1 is priced at 399 pounds sterling (3,300 yuan). The niche brand is only selling phones to selected people due to “limited production capacity.” It is only available in Britain, Japan, India, and some other European countries.
Equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G+ chip and OLED screen, its rear cover is transparent. Before the official presale, Nothing put 100 phones up for auction, leading to a price of over 20,000 yuan (US$3,000). Nothing has so far completed four rounds of financing adding up to US$140 million.
Both brands chose overseas markets to begin with, as the domestic phone market is saturated. But supervision may be a problem for these brands, as the recent clamp down on Chinese phones in India shows.
