Royole

» see royole.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The first foldable phone anyone could buy was not Samsung's. It was the FlexPai, unveiled in Beijing on 31 October 2018 by a six-year-old Shenzhen company called Royole, and the fold was not the part that counted. What counted was that you could order one. Everything else in the category that year was a prototype behind glass at a developer conference.

Royole was founded in 2012 by Stanford engineering graduates led by Bill Liu, and its real business was the panel rather than the phone. It made fully flexible displays and flexible sensors at a Shenzhen production campus it described as quasi-G6, with a second office in Fremont, California. The phone existed to prove the panel worked. In May 2019 Louis Vuitton put a Royole display inside a handbag for its Cruise 2020 show in New York, which is what a component supplier does when it needs the world to look at the component.

I have never held one. The FlexPai had no Turkish retail presence and its launch price put it outside anything I would have bought on impulse. What I did notice from the outside was how quickly the story stopped being about Royole at all. Within a year the foldable argument in every phone thread I read was Samsung against Huawei, and the company that had shipped first was not in the conversation.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

The milestone list Royole kept on its own site reads like a company that enjoyed being first. The world's thinnest full-color flexible display came in 2014, and a foldable 3D mobile theater the year after. By 2017 it was selling a writing pad built on its own flexible sensors. None of these sold in consumer quantities. They were demonstrations aimed at the manufacturers who might one day buy panels by the million.

The money agreed for a while. IDG Capital and AMTD Group were among the backers, and at its height the company was valued at around eight billion dollars. Airbus signed a partnership through its China Innovation Centre in December 2018 to look at flexible displays inside aircraft cabins. The panels were real and so were the demonstrations. The volume buyer that a production line that size needs to stay fed never showed up.

~ the funny part ~

Royole filed to go public on Shanghai's STAR Market toward the end of 2020 and pulled the application a few months later, when problems with its shareholder structure surfaced. Ten months after that, in December 2021, it emerged that staff had gone months without pay. Liu had held an all-hands meeting on 30 November to explain, telling employees the company was arranging financing and expected the money in December. Back pay would come at the end of December or in January, he said, with the caveat that there was still uncertainty.

~ the day it died ~

By 1 April 2024 Caixin was reporting that a court had accepted creditors' bankruptcy petitions against the company. More than three hundred employees joined the filings, some of them unpaid for as long as seventeen months. Shareholders asked for a reorganization instead and pointed at investors they said were interested. The application was ruled inadmissible.

On 18 November 2024 the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court ruled that Royole Technology and two sibling companies carrying the same name must go into bankruptcy liquidation. The grounds were the plain ones: it could not pay its debts as they fell due, and its assets did not cover its liabilities. royole.com does not answer today. The first foldable phone ever sold is an orphan now, and the eight billion dollar valuation that used to sit beside it in every profile is a line in a court file.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »