Pepsi's First Smartphones Struggling to Reach Crowdfunding Goal

The Pepsi Phone P1 and Phone P1s that were unveiled earlier this month may have big financial obstacles before reaching the market. The food and beverage company, which is licensing its Pepsi brand to different manufacturers to make smartphones and accessories, had put the handsets up on crowdfunding platform to raise money for making the handsets, but it appears might not be able to meet the target.

In roughly 10 days since the company kick-started the project on Chinese website JD Finance, it has only managed to raise CNY 1,331,449 (roughly Rs. 13,872,267) of the CNY 3,000,000 (roughly Rs. 3,10,69,901) target. The deadline of the project is Thursday, which means that Pepsi still needs to raise more than half of the goal money in under four days to successfully fund the project.

To recall, Shenzhen-based Scooby Communication Equipment company was announced to be manufacturing the first Pepsi smartphones. The company has revealed two versions the Phone P1 and the Phone P1s, with two smartphones identical except for the latter being compatible specifically with China Unicom's FDD-LTE support.

Both Pepsi Phone P1s and the P1 feature a 5.5-inch 2.5D curved display with a full HD scree resolution (1920x1080) pixels. The devices are powered by a 1.7GHz octa-core MediaTek (MT6592) processor coupled with 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM. The handsets come with 16GB inbuilt storage and supports expandable storage via microSD card (up to 64GB).

On the software side, the handsets run dido OS 6.1 version based on Android 5.1 Lollipop. The smartphones feature hybrid dual-SIM card slots, with the second slot usable for either a microSD card or a SIM card. On the photography smartphones sport 13-megapixel rear camera while there is a 5-megapixel front camera also onboard.

It seems rather evident that the handsets haven't been able to attract consumers. With so many smartphone manufacturers pushing new handsets every few weeks, Chinese consumers are not showing enough interest in the food and beverage company's new Pepsi-branded smartphones offering. Putting the smartphones up on a crowdfunding platform certainly helped the company assess demand for the smartphones, though the embarrassment of failing to raise the funds would be regrettable.