> Carriers were just not interested in phones from smaller manufacturers, and it's not entirely clear that there is no backflow of cash involved at higher levels.
I really doubt it’s something sinister in enterprise sized logistics. Mainly because the big guys don’t need to be al 90’ies Microsoft about it in the modern world of leaned up Enterprise. The service the big global brands come with do save the carriers a lot of money, but it’s done perfectly legal.
First there is the logistics. As a smaller carrier, you won’t really have to worry about doing BI on sales projections and what not, because Apple, Samsung and so on will simply tell you how many phones you can expect to sell, which is basically how many they’ve already produced for your region. They’ll handle everything from warehousing to shipping to your local stores pretty much without you having to do anything but sign the extremely “take it or leave it” sort of B2B contract, that also includes the big companies not charging you for products that don’t sell. What this translates to is that you can basically run your company without a logistics department or any BI related to the actual phone hardware. This saves you money both on manpower but also on not having too much inventory.
Then there the support side of things. By carrying big well known brands with a very low degree of user freedom for modifications you cut the non-carrier related support you need to offer to almost nothing. You could probably offer good money to get carriers to sell, even a well known brand like the fairphone, and they’d still turn you down because it would cost them too much money to do so.
I really doubt it’s something sinister in enterprise sized logistics. Mainly because the big guys don’t need to be al 90’ies Microsoft about it in the modern world of leaned up Enterprise. The service the big global brands come with do save the carriers a lot of money, but it’s done perfectly legal.
First there is the logistics. As a smaller carrier, you won’t really have to worry about doing BI on sales projections and what not, because Apple, Samsung and so on will simply tell you how many phones you can expect to sell, which is basically how many they’ve already produced for your region. They’ll handle everything from warehousing to shipping to your local stores pretty much without you having to do anything but sign the extremely “take it or leave it” sort of B2B contract, that also includes the big companies not charging you for products that don’t sell. What this translates to is that you can basically run your company without a logistics department or any BI related to the actual phone hardware. This saves you money both on manpower but also on not having too much inventory.
Then there the support side of things. By carrying big well known brands with a very low degree of user freedom for modifications you cut the non-carrier related support you need to offer to almost nothing. You could probably offer good money to get carriers to sell, even a well known brand like the fairphone, and they’d still turn you down because it would cost them too much money to do so.