It was once on the verge of global success, but this Chinese smartphone maker just went bust

If this is the first time you’ve heard of Chinese smartphone brand Gionee, then it’s also the last.

That’s because Gionee, which once sold as many as 32 million phones in a single year, has just gone bust.

Set up in 2002 in Shenzhen, China’s gadget city, Gionee was a maker of budget phones before Xiaomi made that cool. It also had some success overseas, becoming popular in price-sensitive markets such as India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Nigeria.

Gionee’s rise and fall can be traced via data supplied to Tech in Asia by research firm IDC:

In 2016, the smartphone market had a “roller coaster year” – one in which Gionee soared while Apple and Samsung lost sales, suggesting it could be part of a new world order in which Chinese gadgets win over shoppers around the planet. Gionee shipped 2.2 percent of the 1.5 billion new smartphones snapped up that year, shifting over 32 million of its Android devices, and putting it close to cracking into the global top five phone brands.

Gionee’s decline is especially stark when seen alongside Huawei’s rise:

In China, Gionee plummeted from 7 percent of sales at the end of 2016 to an effective zero percent in the latest available figures for September 2018, IDC data shows.

The rise of Huawei, Vivo, Oppo, and a resurgent Xiaomi has squeezed smaller brands into an ever tinier margin in China over the past few years.

Back in 2014, China had around 500 smartphone makers, but that dropped to 100 two years later.

Photo credit: Gionee

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