Essential Phone maker cancels next smartphone, may put company up for sale
Essential, the electronics maker co-founded by Android originator Andy Rubin, is reportedly canceling the development of a follow-up to the Essential Phone and considering selling itself.
The company has hired Credit Suisse to provide advice on a potential sale, and has received attention from at least one potential buyer, Bloomberg sources said. Any deal would allegedly involve all of Essential's assets, including patents, workers, and unreleased devices such as an upcoming smarthome product.
The company is said to be shifting resources to focus on the smarthome product, due to launch by 2019.
Rubin, unusually, responded to rumors on Twitter.
"We always have multiple products in development at the same time and we embrace canceling some in favor of the ones we think will be bigger hits," he wrote. "We are putting all of our efforts towards our future, game-changing products, which include mobile and home products."
Essential arrived last year to great fanfare, with $300 million in investments from firms like Amazon, Tencent, and Foxconn, its manufacturing partner and also the assembly partner for Apple's iPhone. Over $100 million of that has been spent on developing the company's first products, the Bloomberg sources claimed.
The Android-based Essential Phone beat Apple's iPhone X to the punch in delivering an edge-to-edge display with a "notch," but has sold poorly compared to expectations. As few as 20,000 units may have been sold at the phone's original $699 price, and even after a $200 price cut, sales may not be much higher than 150,000, the sources said.
In the meantime the company has reportedly lost "dozens" of engineers, and top-level executives like hardware engineering head Joe Tate.
The company has hired Credit Suisse to provide advice on a potential sale, and has received attention from at least one potential buyer, Bloomberg sources said. Any deal would allegedly involve all of Essential's assets, including patents, workers, and unreleased devices such as an upcoming smarthome product.
The company is said to be shifting resources to focus on the smarthome product, due to launch by 2019.
Rubin, unusually, responded to rumors on Twitter.
"We always have multiple products in development at the same time and we embrace canceling some in favor of the ones we think will be bigger hits," he wrote. "We are putting all of our efforts towards our future, game-changing products, which include mobile and home products."
Essential arrived last year to great fanfare, with $300 million in investments from firms like Amazon, Tencent, and Foxconn, its manufacturing partner and also the assembly partner for Apple's iPhone. Over $100 million of that has been spent on developing the company's first products, the Bloomberg sources claimed.
The Android-based Essential Phone beat Apple's iPhone X to the punch in delivering an edge-to-edge display with a "notch," but has sold poorly compared to expectations. As few as 20,000 units may have been sold at the phone's original $699 price, and even after a $200 price cut, sales may not be much higher than 150,000, the sources said.
In the meantime the company has reportedly lost "dozens" of engineers, and top-level executives like hardware engineering head Joe Tate.
Comments
aw diddums
what could be a bigger hit than a total failure? It’s really hard to say.
Could it be that it’s, in fact, not actually reasonable to compare these two phones based upon these two visible aspects? That the more important aspects might be, oh, say, the operating system, the ecosystem, the trust of the brand, the global distribution channels available to each (one of these two companies owns 500+ stores and has tens of thousands of authorized resellers, the other has neither), the complimentary products and cross-product synchronization, etc. Apple is not an easy competitor to go up against, and yet each new upstart is heralded by the press as the next Apple killer, with none of these factors addrsssed in their suppositions. Lesson for history.
"I'm so confident about my next product I might just sell the company! Cheap!"
He didn’t gauge the market well for a quality Android phone for 2017, but his ability to engineer a device and bring it to market is impressive in its own right.
Maybe his next venture will be a market success.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/android-fragmentation-there-are-now-24000-devices-from-1300-brands/
I bet the range of cost and engineering for bicycles at Walmart is fairly wide, while at the same time stil all being at the low end of the market of what is aviable. I’s Assume they have cheap steel bikes with no gears to some aluminum frames with some cheap name-brand gears, but not a single bike made of CF or tested in a wind tunnel.
Here's a cheap ZTE smartphone and the Essential Phone's motherboards. Can you really not see a difference in engineering?