LeTV Senior VP Feng Xing has revealed an important sales milestone of the company. He announced via his Weibo account that LeTV has sold more than 3 million LeTV 1S units in more than two months after its release. For a company, that managed to sell about 4 million smartphones in all in 2015, this is actually a great achievement.
When the company had revealed the sales figure for the year 2015, we knew a majority of the units shipped would have been the budget LeTV 1S model. Now, looking at this 3 million figure, we are even more convinced that the LeTV 1S was actually the company’s best selling model. Feng Xing also praised Compal Electronics for helping them achieve this milestone. It was their production line that managed to churn out over 3 million units in a matter of two months.
For a well-established smartphone manufacturer, this figure is actually not that big. But for a company that started selling smartphone just seven to eight months back, reaching such a sales figure is commendable.
However, it also shows how much the company depends on the budget 1S for its sales. From what we can see, the rest of the models like the LeTV One, One Pro and One Max could only sell over a million units last year.
Moreover, LeTV had said that it is selling the 1S at a loss (ie. at $173 instead of the cost price of $206) which means for every unit sold, it would incur a loss of about $33. Given that the company sold over 3 million units till now, every day it could be making a loss close to a million. Let’s do the math here, the company could be selling more than 30,000 units a day (conservatively considering a 3 month period), which takes the loss to more than $990,000 a day!
It’s really interesting to see how the company is surviving with such loss!
