Realme has just announced a new product strategy earlier today (23rd June 2020). But interestingly, this new strategy bears quite a bit of similarity with Huawei’s own product strategy which was announced back in 2019.
The Chinese company announced earlier today its new 1+4+N product strategy, were ‘1’ refers to smartphones, ‘4’ refers to various IoT products and upcoming IoT and lifestyle products with the ‘N’ standing for new. While this sounds quite elaborate it is nearly identical to Huawei’s 2019 1+8+N strategy. The ‘1’ also stood for smartphones, while the ‘8’ and ‘N’ stood for IoT devices and smart homes and more.
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In other words, the new Realme product strategy seems heavily inspired if not a direct ripoff. The company could’ve easily gone for another branding or name, but the move was quite obvious. Interestingly, a Xiaomi representative took to Twitter to call out Realme’s action, calling them a copy cat and also sharing the product strategy wheel that both companies shared, albeit with a 1 year gap.
It's called as "originality". Dear #CopyCat brand, you should try it sometime. Now even copying slides.
BTW I am surprised – why did you leave the laptop category? We just launched it. Please add that too your slide too. 🙏
Fun times ahead. #CopyCat #FakeMe pic.twitter.com/ljMD5o6mUQ
— Rohit Ghalsasi (@rohitghalsasi) June 23, 2020
Looking at these images, even the illustrations seemed downright copied. This kind of incident isn’t exactly uncommon in the industry and direct inspirations have been seen in the past as well. But this one seems a little too lazy to say the least. To make matters worse, neither Huawei nor Realme’s product strategy is easy to say out loud, so was it even worthwhile?
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(Via)
