Who would have thought that an extremely overpriced DVD player with terrible motion-control games built in and no marketing whatsoever would have trouble selling? In news that has shocked China’s games industry, Eedoo’s $600 CT-510 — a glorified DVD player home entertainment system — is apparently selling so badly that Eedoo has fired Wang Jinzhu, its head of marketing.
I’m just kidding; no one is surprised about this at all (in fact, I sort of called this a full year ago, and then again five months later). In fact, the only part of it that surprises me is learning that Eedoo had a marketing manager to begin with, given that I have never — online or offline — seen any kind of ad, social media campaign, or other promotion for the console.
Putting this all on Wang’s shoulders would be entirely unfair, though, because the utter lack of marketing is only one of the many things wrong with the CT-510. The dumb name, the absurdly high price, the grimly-thin feature list, and the fact that none of its games are particularly appealing are also problems. And those problems, apparently, have led to the Lenovo-backed Eedoo’s inability to secure a B round of financing. Given that the device has cost the company boatloads in R&D, that’s a big problem.
More concerning, though, are indications that all that alleged R&D has been for naught because eedoo doesn’t own any of its own technology. Despite what the company has claimed publicly, a Tencent reporter found that the company has no technology patents listed on the website of China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), which would seem to indicate that Eedoo does not own any of the technology in the CT-510. In our attempts to confirm this, we weren’t able to get the SIPO’s Chinese site to load properly, but searches for Eedoo and related terms on the site’s English search feature returned no results. (In contrast, a search for “Baidu” turned up 24 pages of patents).
So aside from being saddled with an overpriced, undesirable device no one in China knows about and having no investment capital, it sounds like Eedoo could also potentially be guilty of lying about how much of the technology in its device is actually owned by the company. Oh, and did I mention that no one on Eedoo’s management team has much sales experience? Only two of the seven execs listed even mention sales in their bios, and neither of them appear to be sales specialists. That’s a big problem, as selling a totally new and utterly overpriced device to an indifferent market is going to require some serious sales chops.
Given all of that, I think Mr. Wang may be lucky to have gotten out when he did, and I suspect the rest of his Eedoo colleagues may be joining him in the unemployment line before too long.
Stay updated on the go with our mobile app.
Get latest insights with smoother, more personalized experience through TIA mobile app.
