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I said that in my comment? Carriers control visibility for big, flagship phones, but the Chinese manufacturers still manage to sell decently by marketing their
by Analemma_ 8y ago
I said that in my comment? Carriers control visibility for big, flagship phones, but the Chinese manufacturers still manage to sell decently by marketing their cheaper phones directly to consumers. That's the kind of strategy Essential should have emulated, until they got big enough to start cutting deals with carriers.
- unexpected 8y agoagain, 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.