BKAV CEO Nguyen Tu Quang: We have spent more than 1,000 billion VND to make Bphone but we have not received any money yet!

In the CafeTalk program number 07: Breaking stereotypes conducted by CafeBiz, Mr. Quang spent a lot of time talking about Bphone and strategies to break the prejudices that have existed for many years in the minds of Vietnamese consumers.

“Before doing anti-virus software, I understood the psychology and habits formed in Vietnamese people, that I am a poor country, so everything must be cheap. When a Vietnamese company creates a certain product, People say: Must be cheap, must be cheap, On the contrary, if you sell at a high price, you will be criticized as “blood sucking”, making money.But then you don’t understand business, “business” in This is making wealth for the society.

Business or enterprise is just a way to help work better, there are people who want to buy cheap products, people who want to buy mid-range or high-end products, then society will develop. Now, everyone buys cheap, who is crazy about creation, even just to sell high price to a few users, but later improves to become popular. Cheap is not always good, cheap limits a lot of creativity. I know people’s mentality is like that, but if I just follow it, Vietnam’s technology industry will never develop and will fall into a cheap trap.

I made near-premium products and launched Bphone at CES to break the stereotype,” explained Mr. Quang.

According to the founder of Bkav, if you start from the low-cost segment, there will be two problems.

Firstly, people say: ” Yes! Vietnam can only do this!” and then evaluate Vietnam’s capacity with such a cheap product. Second, when making cheap, then it is impossible to change to a higher segment, must continuously cut to the cheapest, leading to not being able to have technology to compete fairly with the big guys. Besides, also because of great social prejudice . People who buy cheap products often have a bad income. Then, when they have more money, they will want to buy other brands’ products, getting out of the low-cost company.

Quang said that this is a national issue. For example, in India, everything requires a very cheap price, so in the end, they successfully outsourced but failed to make the product.

That is also the reason why Bkav’s first phone was born – Bphone 1 belongs to the high-end segment and participated in the famous CES electronics exhibition in the US in 2015. “Looking at it, people will see that : “Oh, Vietnam can do that”, then I can still compete with the big guys. appear in such places, with corresponding products.”

After launching near-premium products, Bkav’s next step towards the mid-end segment is the Bphone A40, A50 and A60 series that have just been launched at the end of 2021. This is the strategy that Mr. Quang has determined since the end of 2021. 10 years ago, even when deciding to enter the smartphone manufacturing market, competitive positioning with all brands, high-end, near-high-end, mid-range or low-cost were also available.

However, the founder of Bkav is also honest that the company is still in the process of investment, spending 1,000 billion dong but has not yet received any money.

“We are really short of money, I have spent trillions of dong, but in reality, trillions in this segment is very small. Just look at the companies that do this segment, at least have billions of dollars in hand. Xiaomi does it It’s cheap, but they also have billions of dollars in hand. But we only have trillions of Vietnamese dollars, but we can do this, it’s the efforts of the whole team, the people of Vietnam. It’s a matter of money, but it has to start with technology. If they can do it with just billions of dollars, I’m sure Europe would have paid for it. After Nokia’s heyday, then they couldn’t. If you can do it, you don’t have enough energy to do it,” Quang said.