Smartisan founder’s dream of beating Apple dies as ByteDance suspends smartphone business
- Entrepreneur Luo Yonghao, founder of Smartisan, once boasted of surpassing Apple’s innovation in smartphones and other devices
- By 2019, Luo was scrambling to pay off Smartisan’s debts amid an economic slowdown in China
“Service to [existing] Smartisan users will not be affected,” the spokeswoman said on Monday. “We will continue to explore the innovation opportunities of Smartisan OS to give users a better experience.”
That restructuring, which was first reported by Chinese media outlet LatePost citing anonymous sources, will have Louis Yang, the co-founder of social media app Musical.ly that was acquired by ByteDance in 2017, head the expanded education hardware group. Yang will report to Chen Lin, education business leader at ByteDance and former chief executive of the Beijing-based company’s Jinri Toutiao news platform, according to LatePost.
He also predicted that Apple “will copy us like crazy” after Smartisan launched its R1 smartphone model and the TNT Station, an all-in-one personal computer that uses the Android operating system.
Despite ByteDance’s efforts, Smartisan has been left behind in China’s crowded smartphone market.
“For Smartisan, their target user group is getting smaller and smaller, with the [domestic] market share below 0.1 per cent in 2020,” said Wang Xi, a research manager at IDC China. “For ByteDance, it’s difficult to see a high ROI (return on investment) even if they keep Smartisan investments going.”
“ByteDance’s entry into connected study aids is just the beginning of its edutech push,” said Michael John, research and strategy manager at consultancy AgencyChina, “[I] expect it to further build its product suite, and advance into digital textbooks … having its own hardware is necessary to deploy educational software for primary and middle school students.”
The company, which has also expanded into video games, has rolled out at least nine education products since 2018, including English-learning platforms for adults and multi-subject courses for children from grades one to 12.
In October last year, ByteDance unveiled a smart lamp as its hardware product for the education sector. The device, which costs 799 yuan (US$123), was designed to enable parents to make video calls via the lamp, as their children did their school assignments at home.
Gogokid, one of the company’s most popular English-tutoring platforms, laid off employees in April 2019, according to a report by local magazine China Entrepreneur.
The stakes are high for Dali, as China’s online education market saw demand grow amid the Covid-19 pandemic, which prompted a shift to e-learning. China‘s online education market was projected to be worth 453.8 billion yuan last year, according to a report by iiMedia Research.
Additional reporting by Jane Zhang