The Fairphone – How Much Does What Cost?

Which device will be my next smartphone? I've made my choice and it will be the Fairphone. It's in the process of being built by a small company established in the Netherlands and the aim is to produce it with the people and the environment in mind. No children labor in African mines, fair wages for Chinese works and safe working conditions. In addition the company is open about the whole process of building the device and using an open operating system, i.e. Android and perhaps Firefox OS and Ubuntu in the future.

The device is in production now with shipment foreseen around Christmas time. One interesting piece of information I recently came across when I wanted to get an update on their status is the cost breakdown of the device's retail price of €325 based on a production run of 25.000 devices. Here are some noteworthy numbers:

  • €129 design, engineering, components, manufacturing
  • €4.75 prototyping
  • €4.25 reseller margin
  • €9 certifications (CE, GCF, RoHS, FCC, Reach) and testing
  • €63 taxes (VAT, etc.)
  • €11.75 personnel costs, office space, IT, travel
  • €11.00 legal, accounting
  • €6 events
  • €5.25 webshop hosting
  • €18.25 warranty costs
  • €11 interventions (sustainability, being fair to people and environment)

For the full details, see here. If you are interested in how a phone is built from scratch then the website is a treasure trove of information. Bring some time…

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