Chinese consumers are tired of all these iPhone clones

Chinese smartphone maker Dakele has collapsed. CEO Ding Xiuhong broke that news himself on his Weibo account Monday evening after months of speculation that the company was headed towards the drain. You probably don’t recognize the name Dakele, but its death may mark the end of an era. The company was founded on the same basic principle as Xiaomi: if you can make a good-quality smartphone and offer it at a surprisingly low price, people will buy it. They’ll be even more excited by it if you can link it to Apple in some way. For Dakele, the Apple link was in the design itself. Its phones were accused of being iPhone clones, and it’s not difficult to see why. But at least they were good clones: the company is widely credited with having made the best iPhone 6 clone money could buy. So what killed Dakele? Frankly, having a good-quality, low-cost smartphone simply isn’t enough to win you customers in the Chinese smartphone market these days. While it worked in the early days of Xiaomi, when real iPhones were a luxury item and smartphone penetration was low, these days everybody in major cities has a smartphone, and the middle class has grown enough that Apple’s uber-expensive iPhone is consistently among China’s top sellers.