Because I’m talking about materials, and not an entire business architecture. If you wanted to make a cheap smartphone and sell it as is and let someone flash on android it’s cheap, and if you use a prepaid SIM you should be able to get away with it pretty easily.
Now if you want to talk about your chance of selling 50K basic smartphones in the US without being able to sell in carrier stores, big bow stores, or really pretty much anywhere… well that’s something entirely different. But there are more than two companies making money on smartphones - and if you spend an afternoon in the place this video takes place you can see that. I mean, Huawei rose to the second largest producers of smartphones in the worlds by producing low volume whitebox phones.
EDIT
Obviously, they abandoned low volume white box phones a long time ago. I’m just pointing out they started small with the other big brands in place.
