Retailers have to apply deep discounts on the device in an attempt to boost sales, which are practically non-existent.
Last year, Apple decided to stop all physical sales in Russia in response to the war in Ukraine. In terms of smartphones alone, the apple brand represented nearly 14% of sales in 2021 in this country of more than 140 million inhabitants. Significant market shares just waiting to be nibbled away by the competition.
A device with average characteristics?
And the Kremlin did not wait long to set out to conquer it. Rostec, a conglomerate of the Russian defense industry, hastened to participate in this war effort, which nevertheless seems very complicated. He developed the AYYA T1, which does not shine with its specifications, at least compared to the latest iPhones.
Powered by a MediaTek Helio P70 SOC (12 nm, 8 cores up to 2.1 GHz), the device is equipped with 4 GB of RAM and a 6.5-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 1600 × 720 pixels at a refresh rate of 60 Hz. To all this is added the absence of 5 G connectivity, but any attentive observer will have certainly already guessed it.
Luckily, it beats the iPhone 14 hands down with its 4,000mAh battery, USB-C port, and microSD card slot of up to 128GB. It’s unclear, however, that’s enough to push consumers to throw away their iPhones, especially since Apple has not completely closed its ecosystem to Russian users and left the App Store open.
18% of manufactured models sold to the general public.
The AYYA T1 is available in two technically similar versions. The consumer model runs Android 11, while the corporate and official version runs Aurora, a Russian operating system with its own more or less government-affiliated app store.
Of the 5,000 units sold, only 905 were sold. A flop that makes Amazon’s Fire Phone look like a commercial success. In 2022, Denis Kuskov, CEO of research firm Telecom Daily, calls these sales ” statistical error » against the 24.5 million smartphones sold in Russia. The AYYA T1 now sells new for around 130 euros, the minimum break-even point for retailers.
Resellers justify these low sales by arguing that most devices are used by civil servants. Indeed, there are currently 2,000 AYYA T1s in the hands of law enforcement and employees of the national nuclear energy agency. That number could rise, however, as the Kremlin recently asked Russian politicians to drop their iPhones.
Source : PhoneArena
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