this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Prediction. Fairphone goes out of business in 3 year due to... lack of demand.
They’ve been in business for a couple of years already so they have their stable niche, but yeah the target audience for these devices is rather small.
IIRC they sell a couple hundred thousand phones a year which is a very small operation compared to big makers that can move that volume on a single model within their lineups of dozens of yearly releases.
Yeah that's like 1d6 towns worth of phones.
They have been in business for over 10 years now, the first one relased in 2013 even if it wasn't really "fair" as today's model, more of a rebrand that guaranteed that workers in China were treated fairly. Still they operate on very low volumes and probably on razor thin margins that don't allow for big R&D projects but so far they have been profitable at least.
Unfortunately they don't sell their new version in the US.
So instead of maybe getting a Fairphone 5 as a backup phone, I bought a super cheap Pixel 7a with the Black Friday sale.
Especially when the EU forces everyone to remove software locks and make parts reasonably available.
At that point why would I want something that’s almost flagship price but performs like an iPhone 7?
It's the price of fair working conditions.
I think they would consider this a win for the company, because they will have contributed to changing the market.
Have you read the article ? they are at their 5th phone this year and have been in business for a couple of years (in europe at least) so it's working. They also recently released headsets and earbuds
And let's hope they scale up slowly, their reports show that their profit margin is extremely slim despite them pricing their phones quite a bit higher than other brands. Meaning if they're to compete for price they won't make a profit
It's nice that they finally establish a communication line with Qualcomm though
That doesn't necessarily mean it's profitable, it could just mean they haven't run out of VC money runway yet.
Their financial reports are open to be read by the public.
They also explicitly say that we're allowed to unlock the phone to use other OSes, so /e/OS can be installed on it with support. This is great.