A Vietnamese firm announced a deal to sell 2 million phones to AT&T and then promptly said it was exiting from the phone business entirely, according to analyst firm Wave7 Research.
VinSmart provided four models to AT&T through white-labelling firm Emblem Solutions: the Cricket Influence, the AT&T Fusion Z, the AT&T Motivate, and the AT&T Maestro Plus, Wave7 principal Jeff Moore said. Only the Influence and Fusion Z currently appear on Cricket’s and AT&T’s websites. VinSmart had also nearly reached a deal to buy LG’s smartphone business, as both companies had factories in the same city in Vietnam, he said.
In December, we reported how VinSmart publicly said it was driving into the US market with a phone that had a 20-megapixel front-facing camera under the screen, a feature that hadn’t been seen on a mainstream phone in the US. That never came to pass; the models that it brought to the US were much humbler and less innovative, with the Fusion Z running $79.99 at prepaid.
This January, VinSmart said that it had reached over 16% market share in its home country of Vietnam and had grown 260% since the beginning of 2020. But on May 9, Bloomberg reported that parent company Vingroup would shut down its smartphone unit to focus on being a car company.
VinSmart’s demise won’t affect the US phone market nearly as much as LG’s exit, and LG’s won’t affect the postpaid market much, Wave7’s report says. Two-thirds of the postpaid carrier reps the firm surveyed said LG would have little impact on the US postpaid world.
But prepaid is another story. Wave7 says that LG’s market share at Metro by T-Mobile was over 25%, and Samsung and Motorola will benefit from its demise. Consumers probably won’t notice the disappearance of VinSmart, as Emblem can just switch suppliers to provide more low-cost AT&T-branded phones.
