Fairphone has so far been a niche player with its focus on modularity, reparability, and sustainability, but the company now has a new CEO and wants to make much bigger waves than before. Reinier Hendriks, the new boss, worked at Vodafone and KPN in the past, and joined Fairphone from Leaseweb. While he doesn’t have experience in smartphone making per se, he thinks his role is all about “understanding the customer”, and that’s the same in all industries.
Hendriks has big plans for the brand. Fairphone will launch in 23 additional markets this year, with Austria and Switzerland already underway, and a sales partner also being found for the UK. Fairphone devices will be offered by carriers as well as distributors across these markets, making them much more visible than ever before.
The new CEO wants to eventually target the €400 price point, which is about €300 less than what the Fairphone 5, the most recent model, is going for. To achieve that feat, Fairphone is more closely collaborating with Google and Qualcomm.
Hendriks says the current model “meets 80% of customer needs”, which is not enough to win over a significant number of consumers – in fact, the brand only sold 235,000 units last year, most of them in Germany (which is one of its biggest markets along with the Netherlands).
To put that into perspective, note that the entire market for smartphones in Germany last year was 20 million. To be more than a blip on the radar, Fairphone needs to go way past 80% of customer needs. Hendriks says people want to make a contribution (to sustainability), but they don’t want to sacrifice everything else in the process.
And that does seem like a solid idea. Hopefully the brand can deliver, since it’s rather unique in the smartphone space. And that uniqueness isn’t lost on Hendriks, who has put together a team working on getting its message across through new marketing channels.
Source (in German)
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