“Kommersant”: sales of the Russian smartphone AYYA did not exceed 400 units in the first quarter
The Russian smartphone AYYA did not interest users in the mass market. Even the departure of foreign brands, associated with the actions of the Russian military in Ukraine, did not lead to an increase in sales of the domestic device – no more than 400 units were sold in the first quarter. Kommersant writes about this with reference to the assessment of Svyaznoy.
The smartphone is also presented in M.Video-Eldorado and Ozon, which refused to provide information on the sale of models, but their partner confirmed the data of Svyaznoy. At the same time, Ozon indicated that most often AYYA T1 is bought by customers from Moscow, Tatarstan, St. Petersburg and the Sverdlovsk region.
The device entered the Russian market in October 2021. The developers positioned it as a smartphone for confidential communication, which excludes the collection of personal data. The launch took place on the Android 11 operating system, but in the future it is planned to use the domestic Aurora OS and expand the share of the domestic component base.
M.Video-Eldorado explained that the device turned out to be niche, focused on a specific audience that cares about the safety of personal data, or on the corporate sector.
In general, sales of smartphones in Svyaznoy in March fell by 23 percent in units and by 22 percent in monetary terms compared to last year. In absolute terms, this is 6.6 million devices for 178.5 billion rubles.
AYYA was not the first domestic development that they are trying to bring to the Russian market. In 2013, Yota Devices released the YotaPhone, but the smartphone was later sold to China and the project was closed in 2017. Yandex.Telephone lasted on the market from 2018 to November 2019. The Tigafon project, which Natalya Kaspersky’s Infowatch company tried to promote, was closed in 2019 after five years of work with a loss of 40 million rubles.
A market source noted that attempts to sell the AYYA T1 to a mass user immediately looked risky. Security and privacy cannot replace access to popular ecosystems and applications, and even on Android, they are a problem. He also expects difficulties with localization – without processors and printed circuit boards that are not produced in Russia, transfer to a new OS is impossible even at the testing level.
Source: Lenta
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