By Sky Li – Founder and CEO realme
With realme’s fourth “828 Fan Festival” coming up on August 28th, 2022, we’d like to take a little moment to celebrate the past four years. It feels like just yesterday that we set out on a mission to empower the next generation of youth through access to leap-forward performance and trendsetting designs. Who would have thought that, just four years later, we could come so far? We’ve brought amazing user experience to 140 million fans around the globe, made innovative technology more accessible, and most importantly, we’ve brought people closer through our products, our designs, and our realme community.
When we first set out on our mission, we were staring up at a monolith. The mobile phone market was highly saturated, with the same old players occupying the majority of the market share. But, guided by our “Dare to Leap” spirit, we never faltered, because we knew our mission was too important. Millions of youths around the world are counting on us to make innovative tech and design more accessible, because even today, we are still the only smartphone brand out there fully focused on the youth and empowering them to get ahead.
Of course, there are moments when we’ve found ourselves asking the difficult questions: Can we maintain this pace of growth? Can we continue to surprise our users year after year? Can the story of realme hold firm in this complex and ever-changing landscape?
Well, after analyzing our global strategy, we can respond to all of these questions with a resounding “Yes!”
Today we are as confident as we have ever been. We have a loyal fanbase spanning the globe, we are gaining a firm foothold in the industry, and the data shows that our comprehensive market rollout has been remarkably effective.
But past success is past success, and at realme we are always focused on tomorrow. realme is now entering its second stage of growth as a startup, and in this next phase of our journey we will further refine our focus on targeted, long-term growth. This means an added focus on product quality and market focus.
On the product side, we will follow what we call our “Simply Better” strategy, which will be exactly as it sounds. In this next phase of growth, we will place a premium on product, increasing investment in R&D by 58% year-over-year in order to further advance our abilities in making essential tech innovations more accessible. This means you can expect even more exceptional Number Series phones moving forward, as our Number Series is our “essential” product line, packing essential tech into a stylish package with an accessible price tag. And in addition to improving product quality, we will also streamline our operations by pooling our resources into global unified deployment, so that everything from product to operations are simply better. Doing everything we can to make our products even more exceptional will be the cornerstone of our growth moving forward.
Positive changes will be coming on the market side as well. Now that we have defined our core markets, we will place a new focus on stability over expansion. We call this new market focus our “Market Cultivation” strategy, which will place particular focus on our two 10-million shipment markets while working towards building a core of fifteen 1-million shipment markets. At present, we have seven markets with annual shipments exceeding 1 million units, and we are now Top 5 in certain markets. But can we achieve Top 3 in all of these markets, or what about Top 1? We’ve never been afraid of dreaming big.
Even with the broad market uncertainty the industry is currently facing, we are confident that we have a place in this industry no matter what storms we will have to weather down the line, because difficult moments do not last forever.
In fact, there is reason for optimism. Smartphones have made us more capable than ever before, and now the age of AIoT is extending these capabilities further. The road ahead remains bright, if difficult. The future we are working to build is one where technology brings youth around the world closer, inspired to do something great in their lives. We are here to see this dream into fruition, no matter how many years it may take.
Long though the journey may be, we know that our focused efforts will take us there.