Summary
- Fairphone aims to minimize environmental impact with modular designs, but needs to reach a wider audience to compete effectively.
- New CEO Reinier Hendriks plans to expand Fairphone internationally and lower prices to increase competitiveness in the market.
- Fairphone is working towards a goal of driving down the price to €400 by collaborating with manufacturers and software partners.
Fairphone has been around for over a decade, and in that time, the company has made it its mission to produce phones that minimize environmental impact. It’s been able to accomplish this daunting task by offering handsets that are the complete opposite of its competition. With sustainability in mind, the brand produces devices with modular designs, allowing for easy repairs and upgrades by its customers. The message from the brand has been quite clear from the start, with an aggressive plan to disrupt the smartphone industry. But there’s been one problem — its message hasn’t been heard by enough people, and Fairphone’s aggressively looking to change this.
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In a new report by Handelsblatt, the publication sat down with Fairphone’s new boss Reinier Hendriks and discussed the current state of the company and its ambitious plans for the future. Although Fairphone has been turning a profit and selling a good number of its handsets, it has only done so in a small market. While this is good, it has aspirations to compete with some of its competitors and in order to do this, the company will need to make some big changes.
What is Fairphone planning for the future?
In his new position, Hendriks is on a mission to take Fairphone to the next level. As far as what this entails, the main goal for the company is expansion, which means taking Fairphone into an international space where it will be recognized by people outside its home turf. Fairphone has plunged head first into its latest campaign by expanding into regions like Austria, Switzerland, and even Great Britain. The brand is also making other changes as well, like how it communicates its products to potential customers.
Of course, none of this is easy when the brand’s current handset, the Fairphone 5, comes in at a whopping €699. While that price doesn’t seem all that bad on its own, when you dive into the specifications, the price tag looks less attractive, as a majority of its offerings lag far behind its competitors, which means, if you’re not behind the company’s message, you’re going to get better bang for your buck from the likes of OnePlus and Samsung. The company understands this and Hendriks wants to fix this.
In order to deliver a better price and experience with its products, Fairphone needs to work closer with parts manufacturers and software partners. Hendriks is ambitious, stating that the goal is to drive down the price to €400, which will make it far more attractive to outsiders. If it manages to hit this price, the drawbacks of its products can easily be overlooked. Of course, driving down the price so aggressively is easier said than done, especially when the company is going to try and hold onto its roots.
With that said, changing this drastically will be a great challenge for the company, but it has shown with its previous devices that it has the infrastructure to support its vision, and now it just needs to work harder to bring this to a wider audience. It’s unclear exactly how this story will unfold, but Fairphone seems like an ambitious bunch, and its team is poised and ready to deliver.
