Miquel Ballester, co-founder of Fairphone, talks to us about how they compete with giants

I meet again Miquel Ballester twelve years later. I interviewed him in 2013: I started my career in Xataka, and he did the same in Fairphonea company he officially co-founded a few months earlier with a singular goal: “to create the world’s first fully fair smartphone.”

Many things have changed since then. We both already have gray hair, and we have both experienced from our side of the industry how smartphones have conquered the world and then become a standard and everyday product that has one difficulty: that of being truly differentiating.

A different mobile in everything. Including your materials

But at Fairphone they have managed to do precisely that: differentiate themselves. Your focus is totally different to that of the rest of the manufacturers, and although that part of the original mission has not changed, it has also expanded. According to Ballester, “it has always been a tool,” because Fairphone’s intention was to “change the industry from within.”

In fact, he explains, “we could have made our way by remaining an NGO or getting into the industry in another way, perhaps inspiring other companies and convincing them that there was a market for fair electronics.” Instead they decided to apply the old “if you want something well done you have to do it yourself”, and got to work. This is how the original Fairphone was born and how the others have emerged.

Thus, the Fairphone commitment to conflict-free minerals remains one of the hallmarks of its devices. Miquel Ballester confirms that the situation has improved, in part, thanks to legislative changes such as those that have emerged in Europe. “Monitoring and reporting that reveals where certain materials come from, but conflict-free minerals are only one part” of the equation, he points out.

The company has scaled its commitment from the initial 4 supply chains to 23 monitored chains, with the goal of half of its materials coming from fair or recycled sources. The new Fairphone (Gen. 6) is the demonstration of that work: more than 50% of the weight of its materials corresponds to fair or recycled materials (that percentage was 42% in the Fairphone 5).

This direct management of the chain is vital, especially when deal with rare earthswhose shortage global affects the entire industry. Ballester clarifies that, although they notice the impact on the price, the one directly affected by the volume and wait challenges is the company that manufactures the component, not always the final assembler.

Long live modularity and repairability

If there is one thing that defines Fairphone, it is its radical approach to repairability and modularitysomething they have successfully extended beyond phones, as evidenced by their repairable headphones, the amazing Fairbuds.

That philosophy raises an inevitable question: “Does being repairable and modular involve too many sacrifices?” According to Ballester,

“In Generation 6 we are very proud of the balance we have achieved between performance, modularity and sustainability. We have had to say no to many things, but they have all been good strategic decisions that went in one direction: getting a balanced phone for the type of consumer and the type of market we are in.”

It is in these decisions that it has been decided, for example, whether to opt for one or another cutting-edge components. We have an example in the ultra-wide-angle sensor, which has lowered its resolution which “has nothing to do with modularity”, but rather to seek a balance and a good balance of specifications.

But of course, that philosophy imposes certain criteria. Thus, this engineer and entrepreneur explains to us, “modularity imposes design and size restrictions“. For example, to ensure a large and serviceable battery, the device had to be “a few millimeters thicker” (9.6 mm in the case of the Fairphone (Gen. 6)).

Despite this, Ballester emphasizes that this modularity cannot compromise the design too much. In the end, the mobile phone needs to “work and be attractive. It is super important that when a person goes to a store – we are in 20 operators throughout Europe – they see a terminal with a good design.”

All that history and experience has allowed them to polish once again a design that remains remarkable but that at the same time includes a battery of decent capacity (4,415 mAh) that is also interchangeable/repairable. The result for him and his team is remarkable:

“I’m very proud of the design we’ve achieved with the Fairphone (Gen. 6). It feels good in hand, is light, maintains balance and has a larger screen than the Fairphone 5, which was one of the key goals we had.”

In fact, we asked Ballester about past mistakes that they learned from, and he precisely alluded to the predecessor of this mobile. “The Fairphone 5 is a very good device, but it is also I tried to do many things. With the Fairphone (Gen. 6) we were able to make stricter decisions about what should be included and what not, and thanks to that we were able to launch it at a more affordable price.”

It’s true: the Fairphone 5 was launched at 699 euros, while the Fairphone (Gen. 6) has a retail price of 599 euros, a notable difference especially considering that it is normal for everything to go up in price, not go down.

For him, in fact, what happened with the Fairphone 5 led to a very important learning experience. “The 5 responded to a certain moment in the company, there was uncertainty, we did not want to close doors. With Gen. 6 we have taken another path even knowing that perhaps we were leaving things behind. You can’t try to please everyone because in the end you don’t make anyone happy.“.

Fairphone in Spain and how to compete with giants

At Fairphone they remain especially focused on conquering the European market first. Ballester comments that they have a presence in Germany, Holland, the United Kingdom and France thanks to their agreements with operators. Being in the stores of these operators is key for their business, and the question is obvious: what about Spain?

For him “the market in Spain is a little different for our type of product. In other European countries people spend more money on phones” and he admits that “we are not so cheap because being so would not allow us to do certain things.”

The mid-range sector is larger in other geographies, highlights Ballester, who adds that “when you enter into conversations with operators, that is important.” That does not prevent keep that door open and may enter the Spanish market as well as other regions in the future.

In the countries in which it has a presence, Fairphone has fierce competition. So, we were very interested in knowing how that ethical vision balances with the pressure of competing in a market dominated by economies of scale and low margins.

His answer is clear: “with a value proposition that our target consumer values ​​and pays for.” That modularity and repairability of their phones is the great differentiating factor, but other elements are added to this, such as Fairphone Momentswhich they developed “with sweat and tears because remember, there are 150 people working in the company.”

This component is a launcher that “dumbs up” your smartphone and that follows the trend of some proposals already seen in recent months. Instead of going to a screen full of icons, this layer of customization proposes a simple but elegant list of frequent applications, and from there interact with the mobile in a much more minimalist way.

The objective: to try to our smartphone is a product that distracts us less because, as Fairphone indicates, with this launcher “there are no pings. There are no social feeds. There are no distractions.” Switching from one mode to another is very simple, and the Fairphone (Gen. 6) has an attractive yellow physical switch on its right side.

This effort is reminiscent of the one they already made with the first Fairphones, which in fact boasted of being governed by Fairphone OSa personalization layer of your own. They ended up abandoning that effort “due to the amount of work it takes to maintain a customization layer.”

Since then, the company has opted to have a fairly standard version of Android—always with some customizations—but as Ballester highlights,

“With the Fairphone 5 and (Gen. 6) we have brought the software a little more towards the Fairphone identity. There are also “very Fairphone” things in the camera interface or the ringtones, and we are taking small steps in that personalization that is more ours, in addition to the fact that we have more people to carry out that work.”

User evolution and expansion plans

Precisely at this point we asked our protagonist about this change in the name of his mobile phones. After using a simple number as a way to differentiate its mobile phones, the company has now preferred to take a turn and start calling all its mobile phones simply “Fairphone”. The only thing that differentiates them is that final “(Gen. 6)”. According to Ballester “the name of the product should simply be “The Fairphone”, not a number.”

The user profile of these devices has also evolved, he highlights. “If we want to inspire the industry, we have to grow in the number of users we want to reach, but without losing focus on sustainability values.” Thus, he explains, before they had users

“With a more activist profile, it was a group that I was more willing to take more risks.. They wanted to buy “green electronics” and the amount of risk they were willing to take was greater. As you expand that, people want less risk. They want the mobile to work well, to have extended software support, many things that attract the audience. But in the end the goal is the same: buy something and make it last a long time.”

For Fairphone, its main market remains Europe. While in the United States they operate through a partner (Murena) that only sells the version with /e/OS (a mobile operating system focused on privacy and “without Google”), Ballester, as we said, sees the greatest opportunity for growth on the European continent.

Regarding the ambition of the project, Ballester is confident: “Nothing you just said scares me,” he responds to the idea of ​​multiplying sales by 2, 5 or 10 in the next five years. The Fairphones (Gen. 6) “are working well, we are very happy with the reception” and will continue to focus on them as well as on the audio segment.

In fact, we wanted to ask them if they would end up attacking other product segments, such as laptops or perhaps printers, a segment where interesting projects in the field of repairability seem to be moving. They get along very well with the people at Framework – there are former Fairphone employees working there – for example, but for now they will continue to focus on the same categories in which they work now.

And they don’t do anything wrong with them, of course.

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