You might remember, towards the end of the hellscape that was 2021, the Balmuda Phone. This smartphone is made by a Japanese company that traditionally focuses on more conventional gadgetry. It had an interesting set of features, but there was one that wasn’t mentioned when it was first revealed.

That’d be the ability to absolutely wreck Balmuda’s stock price. To be fair, the phone’s creators probably didn’t know that function was included either.

Balmuda blows… up?

Reuters has a report on the company’s stock prices, which initially suggest when the Balmuda Phone was first announced in May 2021. But subsequent looks, and the actual launch, have absolutely killed the company’s value on the stock market.

Part of this is the price. The handset, which is made by Kyocera, doesn’t feature the specs you’d expect from a R14,000 smartphone. It’s also lacking the premium-ness fans of the brand itself have come to expect from Balmuda products. They might be ‘luxury’ toasters, as well as fans and coffee makers, but the principle remains the same.

But the last straw was the company halting sales, “due to an unidentified issue regarding compliance with Japan’s technical standards,” reports Reuters. That, and influencers have been making fun of it. All this led to a 10% drop in company value on Tuesday alone.

It’s a bit of a cautionary tale. The Japanese company took a serious chance in launching a smartphone with zero experience. The idea, obviously, was that fans would love its unusually-curved design and would overlook any flaws there might be. But numbers don’t really lie. The fact that the company’s stock is now valued at less than half what it was in May seems… pretty decisive.

Source: Reuters