Netease CEO Ding Lei
Back in May, Netease was one of the many companies planning on releasing a branded low-cost smartphone to compete with the likes of Xiaomi in China. Earlier this month, rumors began swirling that the phone project had been canceled, but now the company’s CEO Ding Lei has attached some weight to those rumors by refusing to comment on the project’s progress at a meeting with reporters in Hangzhou.
Mr. Ding has previously been very vocal about the smartphone project, and while his avoidance of the subject at this outing cannot be considered confirmation that the phone has been cancelled, it certainly doesn’t look good, coming as it does on the wings of anonymous internal sources claiming the project has been scrapped.
Netease representatives declined to comment for this story.
In mid-June, Ding announced that official images of the phone would be coming soon, and the Beijing News reported on the device’s specs: a 4.3-inch screen, dual-core CPU, Android 4.0 OS, and of course the device’s sub-1000 RMB ($158) price tag. Given those specifics, it seems the project was quite far along. It’s not clear what might have caused the device to be scrapped, but a rumored partnership with OPPO apparently fell through, and anonymous sources told Sina Tech that even the smartphone project’s manager was ambivalent about the project and advised Ding Lei to cancel it.
It’s also quite possible that Netease canned the project for financial reasons, as producing a competitive smartphone for less than 1000 RMB is quite difficult, especially for a company whose area of expertise is on the web, not in sourcing cheap hardware parts.
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