innos - manufacturer of "large-battery" smartphones with the concept of a smartphone-designer comes to Russia and Europe
Hello! My name is Alexey Starodymov. In this post, I will talk about the innos brand or, more precisely, about the entry of the innos brand into the Russian and European markets. Rumors about this event have been walking on the Runet for a month or two. I decided to either confirm or deny them, and contacted innos. It turned out that these were not rumors at all, but very true. The innos European office told me a lot of interesting things. But for starters - a few thoughts from myself ...
... Little-known in Russia, but eminent in their homeland, large Chinese electronics manufacturers have tried several times to enter the domestic market and gain a foothold in it. (They don’t come to Europe at all, but more on that below.) It turned out, however, not very well. In 2013, OPPO came to Russia with great fanfare with its smartphones, but it still could not stay with us.
In 2015, Xiaomi officially appeared in Russia, however, with only one tablet. The news of this quickly flew over all the major news feeds and ... was forgotten. OPPO and Xiaomi - different cultures, different companies, different times for entering the Russian market and ... the same mistakes. The thing is that you can enter the Russian market in different ways. You can do it yourself, or you can with the help of a distributor. The latter is advantageous in that it can have well-established connections with a large federal retail, and this (theoretically) will help fast and significant sales of devices. In addition, the presence of a distributor partner allows you not to invest in the creation and development of your own representative office. But this is all in theory. In practice ... In practice, in the case of little-known Chinese companies that are trying to take root in Russia, this very “distribution” scheme either does not work at all, or does not work at all as the Chinese would like. The devices offered by the giants of Chinese gadget building are interesting, first of all, to people who know, to geeks. And therefore, initially betting on the sale of these very devices of a brand unknown to the general public in regular retail is at least short-sighted: geeks almost never go to ordinary stores.
Especially considering that the wrapping of retail chains now reaches almost 40%, and the initially interesting and profitable geek (= cheap) Chinese device with a “sweet” spec at a “sweet” price, thanks to retail chains, is turning into a far from profitable expensive Chinese device from brand completely unknown to the general public. Geeks are advanced people: they will order one or another gadget from China if they wish; the main thing is to be as cheap as possible. Well, or at worst, at least in a branded Russian online store they will buy, if one or another Chinese brand has one. To make it even more expensive than when ordering from China, but with some kind of bonuses like an official guarantee or, say, a gift accessory. But, one way or another, it’s truly effective to develop the entire ecosystem associated with sales, supply, marketing, Support is only possible through your own office. Distributors will not do this. Especially well-known broad-profile companies, which, as a rule, catch the largest portfolio of Chinese, who are not very advanced in terms of the rules of the local Russian market.
As a rule, a distributor needs to take a lot, quickly sell it in bulk to large networks, give the latter a margin (margin can be up to 40%!), Pay the due share to the Chinese and quickly buy a new lot. All! If the scheme fails, and for some reason the network DOES NOT buy a new batch of goods, this is why the work with the Chinese brand from the distributor is usually minimized. And the brand takes an honorable 135th place in the distributor's price list (sales volumes are dozens of pieces per month, as they say, "give it up to the heap ... how is it? .. well, give 10 pieces ..."). Thus, it is interesting for an ordinary ordinary Russian distributor to sell brands and products that actually sell themselves: put it on a shelf and it flew away. If a brand needs to be somehow developed, invested in recognition, an ordinary Russian distributor, as a rule, quickly losing interest in him: few people are ready to develop an ALIEN brand for their hard-earned money today. As a rule, just those with a small portfolio of products and brands are ready. And the Chinese themselves are afraid of such distributors: where is the scope of the business? Where the huge momentum (few people think thatfor most of this turnover is generated deliveries already promoted and popular brands in the nation)? Where is bursting from the number of portfolio brands?
Understanding that few distributors and local partners will be as “rooting” for a product released by a foreign partner as the manufacturer himself, the innos brand, which will be discussed in this post, enters the Russian market without using the standard model “manufacturer retail distributor. " Innos acts directly through the creation of a full-fledged own representative office in Russia. And the brand chooses the main sales channel, in fact, the model of growing by leaps and bounds Chinese Internet giants like AliExpress or JD.com - direct shipments to consumers. The only difference is that the goods are shipped to the consumer, correctly Russified, carefully tested in our mobile networks and provided with 100% proprietary support and support. A product that is 100% covered by the Law on Consumer Protection. And the goods are shipped to the consumer directly from the factory, which provides 100% the lowest of all possible prices - there are no intermediaries at all. Not even in the form of "non-greedy" in terms of markups of the Chinese online store. Only factory and consumer, consumer and factory.
For starters, a few words about innos. JSR, owning the innos brand, was founded in 2009 by a team of engineers (about 30 people) who left the bowels of the development departments of ZTE, Huawei and Motorola. In March 2011, JSR founded the Innos brand itself (or innos - the Chinese, in my opinion, themselves have not yet figured out how to - with small or large i).
When creating new products, special emphasis is placed on the use of the most top-end components from leading manufacturers: Qualcomm (chipsets), Sharp (screens), Sony (camera modules), Corning (glass for protecting Gorilla Glass screens). In 2012, the first JSR smartphone, Innos D9, with the most powerful battery in the world at that time (4 160 mAh), was released. In Russia, Innos D9 was presented in the form of two modified modifications under two local Russian brands.
In 2013, sales of the second smartphone with a "megabattery" - Innos D10 began. He again became a smartphone with the most powerful battery in the world at that time (6,000 mAh). In Russia, a revised modification of this model was sold under one of the local brands. Moreover, the version for Russia was equipped immediately with two batteries of different capacities: 3,000 and 6,000 mAh. It was the first smartphone in the world with interchangeable batteries of different capacities. Innos' Russian partners even submitted an application to the Guinness Book of Records for a world-record battery life provided by a pair of standard batteries - up to two weeks!
As you can see, innos is a manufacturer that focuses not just on smartphones with powerful batteries, but on smartphones with VERY powerful (the most-most powerful in the world!) Batteries. And not just smartphones with the most powerful batteries, but smartphones that can work with several replaceable batteries of different capacities.
As for the scale of the company, there is no illusion: yes, this is not Samsung, not LG and not some Lenovo. But! JSR is still a fairly large manufacturer with its R&D, that is, research centers, its factories, with a staff of more than 500 people. And JSR is a Qualcomm certified partner - in Russian, chipsets, technologies, and software from an American manufacturer are received by JSR a little earlier than most other Chinese manufacturers.
And at the very end of 2015, innos came to Russia, not together with local partner brands, but under its own brand. The European office of the company created by innos, let's say, will be minimalistic - in a good sense of the word. That is, no one plans to hire a couple of hundred pathos managers in suits and ties. For the content of which, of course, the final consumer would have to pay - the cost of the usual corporate pathos for large companies is laid down in the price of a smartphone. A small number of employees of the innos European office will "pay off" with their extremely high efficiency - that is, for every ruble of expenses for the team and promotion innos intends to receive returns several times more than large top companies such as Huawei, ZTE or Lenovo.
The office will be headed by Mikhail Chernyshov, a former Highscreen commercial director and one of the brand’s main ideologists. A person, in fact, who has grown from scratch the most controversial and perhaps the most famous domestic brand of smartphones. Experience in the smartphone market - 14 years.
Kirill Sergeev is responsible for the creation of all services and user support. In the past, he worked at Yota and MTS, where he was involved in the creation, implementation and management of IT solutions. Experience in the telecom industry - 8 years.
Responsible for the product is Alexander Martirosov. He has 9 years of experience in large Russian and European mobile electronics manufacturing companies. At Prestigio, he held the position of Product Manager; at Prology, he was Development Director.
Marketing Director was Mikhail Fadeev, who successfully raised the glofiish smartphone business (E-Ten, a Taiwanese company, was acquired by Acer in 2008), and then, for 8 years, together with the notorious Marina Rozhkova, who had his hand in brand promotion for the local gadget market: Highscreen, PocketBook, Just5 and many others.
Of course, the office staff will not be limited to these comrades - there will be other people. But again, no “armies”. Only a few specialists, but all with many years of experience in the successful development of novice brands in the smartphone segment.
As mentioned above, the basic principle of innos in Russia is exclusively direct sales according to the “factory - consumer” scheme. Without left importers, Russian partners, troubled distributors, without large federal retailers and other intermediate links, each of which adds its own (and sometimes considerable!) Percentages to the initial “factory” value of a particular smartphone. There will be a branded innos online store, and there will be buyers who can order devices with it to deliver home or anywhere. All. Point.
In offline Russian smartphones stores innos will not be, because such sales - in fact, the last century. The past century is simply unprofitable, given the declining purchasing power of Russians and the unwillingness of retailers to reduce their raging appetites: retailers are trying to compensate for the decrease in the number of customers by increasing their margins on manufacturers' products. So selling really high-quality models in large retail becomes banal inefficient - with giant mark-ups of networks, their price tag flies just to heaven.
The highlight of innos approach to Russian consumers will be the provision of an innovative option of express delivery - from a foreign warehouse in 2-7 days. In this case, any cheat intermediaries are excluded, because The buyer pays directly to the manufacturer. Here are a few words about one more know-how - an unusual approach to the service. You can write support at any time of the day, which corresponds to the European level of service. (In the future, round-the-clock voice support may also be added to online support.) Not a single Chinese or local brand has yet supported its smartphones in Russia.
It is interesting to note that Russia for innos is only the first "official step" outside of China. Then very soon (at least according to the promises of the company) Europe will follow. Exactly this: unlike all other Chinese "young" brands, innos intends to enter the European market through Russia. Of course, not immediately and not instantly. In fact, access to Europe is an unprecedented step for the “top-young” Chinese manufacturer. All these Meizu, OPPO, Xiaomi and so on are not officially represented on the European market. First of all, for the reason that they are afraid of patent claims from manufacturers of the first league - claims can relate to both technology and design. In Russia and Asia they look at copying through their fingers, but in Europe you can get it very seriously for it. In innos apparently more confident in their "patent purity." And this is quite possible: indeed, no large smartphone manufacturer has such technologies for working with large batteries and batteries of different capacities yet. Or do they just not show them yet?
As the first product for the Russian market innos offers the "big-bore" innos D6000. Then other devices will follow - in the first quarter of 2016, announcements of new products are scheduled. innos D6000 is a device in which the concept of working with two batteries of different capacities has been developed in the form of the ability to work on a pair of batteries at the same time , and not alternately, as in previous models. That is, in front of us is the world's first smartphone that can simultaneously run on two batteries. One built-in (2,480 mAh), the second removable (3,520 mAh). It is interesting to look at people's faces when a removable battery is pulled out with them, and the smartphone does not turn off. See for yourself a video demonstration of this focus.
In theory, you can buy as many external batteries as you want (they will be offered in the “accessory” section of the company’s online store) and get a kind of “perpetual” engine that will need to be connected to an outlet, for example, once a month to sequentially recharge all purchased batteries. To forget about the outlet and charging altogether for another month. And yes, the ability to "hot swap" a removable battery - without turning off and restarting the device - is really a unique feature. In order for such a smartphone to see the light, innos engineers needed to seriously modify the Qualcomm hardware platform: initially, no smartphone platform in the world supported the simultaneous use of batteries of different capacities with the possibility of "hot swap". Engineers managed to achieve the unification of battery capacities during their use and charging.
Otherwise, in terms of hardware, the D6000 smartphone is also curious: a USB Type-C port with USB 3.1, full support for LTE (including Russian frequencies), a 5.2-inch Full HD-screen made by JDI, Android 5.1 with the possibility of a future update up to 6.0, as much as 3 GB of RAM, 5 and 16 megapixel cameras produced by OmniVision, tempered glass Corning Gorilla Glass 3.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core 64-bit chipset is no coincidence: innos has a license to use the Snapdragon 810, but it is a) very expensive and b) prone to overheating, which leads to a low overall stability of the smartphone. As you can see, nobody began to risk reliability. In general, the D6000 is such a good, well-knit mid-range device at the level of Lenovo and Huawei. It should be understood that when a smartphone is created with an aim to be sold under the local Russian brand, and even through Russian retail chains, then there are much less sophisticated technologies and expensive components that could be imagined. Just in order to “set” an adequate selling price, and so that this price after all the markups by the brand and retail would still remain “tasty” for the consumer. In the case of the D6000, these “links” do not exist, which made it possible to realize a maximum of bells and whistles in the device for more than a humane price. And also offers a special price for pre-order, whichalready open .
For comparison - on the same AliExpress smartphone innos D6000 is already offered for $ 245 (approximately 19 thousand 500 rubles). And, of course, this is a non-Russified version, without an official manufacturer’s warranty. But I will not talk more about the smartphone, as a full review is being prepared with screenshots, photos, benchmarks and so on. Just once again, I note the main thing: innos D6000 is by no means the next typical “kit” in the “media library” with crooked firmware and last year's hardware. And, as mentioned above, the device is the same level as Xiaomi and Meizu.
These are the pies. In my humble opinion, the appearance on the Russian smartphone market of such an ambitious new player, moreover, a player of a serious and, most importantly, experienced and highly professional, with his original, unlike any other concept of product development, is very cool. Nevertheless, not every day companies come to Russia, we will say that with the correct ideology and our own clear vision of the “beautiful”. And with original products - not with just another iPhone-like, but with proprietary technologies and know-how. Let's see what “Dream Team” can do - there is an opinion that the word innos will appear more than once or twice in news feeds in the foreseeable future - both in Russian and in European. Well, if you have any questions, then you can safely ask them in the comments.