BLU Products: Facts about the Brand

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BLU Products is one of the finest yet least popular smartphone brands in Kenya. It is totally okay if you haven’t about them since the company hardly markets itself and is yet to officially launch in Kenya.

There are a couple of BLU smartphones in the market and Jumia Kenya in fact has a large selection of the smartphones (about 23) but very few buyers are actually aware of the existence of the smartphones.

Before, we get deeper into what BLU Products is all about, here is a brief low down on the smartphone brand. First things first, BLU stands for Bold Like Us and the company began its operations in 2009 in Miami, Florida (USA).

The company has a mission of providing low base priced smartphones that target the low income population inside the USA, Latin America, Western Europe and China. This is however, according to its not so credible Wikipedia page.

The company grew but it wasn’t until 2013 when the company started becoming a preferred brand of unlocked smartphones in the USA. In fact in 2013, David Pierce (awesome Tech writer) did an interesting feature on the company and gave them a rather modest description of a “tiny company that thinks it can beat Samsung.”

The feature involved a chat with, BLU Products Founder, Sammy Ohev-Zion and he gave quite a comprehensive background on what his company is all about.

BLU embraces a low overheads, low price model that ensures that its smartphones cost significantly less than its competitors. Other smartphone vendors who embrace the model include Xiaomi and Infinix Mobility.

The cost of components required to make a smartphone such as Chipsets are pretty much the same for every smartphone vendor. The difference in pricing comes in after the company puts in the overheads required to let’s say market and distribute the smartphone plus the margin it requires from each unit.

This therefore basically means, the premium that you think you are paying on a smartphone could easily have nothing to do with the smartphones Bill of Material but rather it’s about you offsetting the a company’s huge marketing budget.

BLU’s strategy seems to be working out perfectly since the company has its products ranked as the bestselling unlocked smartphones on Amazon. This is in no way a mean feat considering that the BLU brand is less than five years old.

BLU Products obviously has what it takes to conquer the Kenyan market. The company’s smartphones that are already available in the market have very attractive prices. BLU Smartphones have prices that are below Ksh. 15,000 and this is the most competitive price group in Kenya.

The company doesn’t spend much on marketing and consequently very little is known about the brand It is therefore rather unlikely that the low-cost smartphone brand will bring a disruption. But yet again the African market isn’t really in its scope at the moment and therefore, it is interesting to see how all this will play out.