You will never find them in phone shops, not even in the best-stocked ones. If anything, you have to go to the luxury streets, among the Rolex and Cartier shops. They cost a lot, but they're not smartphones either. They are Vertu cell phones, simple mobile devices with a numeric keypad and non-touch screen. With over ten thousand euros, you take home a phone that does nothing but make calls and send text messages.
For iPhone owners, the choice might seem surreal. But the point here is not the technology, but the luxury applied to mobile telephony.
Vertu is a small company based not far from London. Once a subsidiary of Nokia, it was bought last year by Swedish private equity group EQT.
The company is stingy with figures, but according to reports from Les Echos, takings have grown every year, except for 2008, and reached 300 million euros last year. Since 2013, the CEO has been an Italian, Massimo Pogliani, 47 years old.
In its 10 years of existence – which makes it, explains CEO Pogliani, “the progenitor of the young luxury telephony market” – Vertu has sold over 350 handsets. Which is the number of iPhones sold in one day. With the significant difference that the average price of this mobile phone is around 5 euros and the maximum price is difficult to calculate, because the customizations also include the use of diamonds.
The company's products are only three. The base model is the Signature, which accounts for 20% of sales. Then two smartphones were introduced, the Constellation and the Ti, which share the rest of the pie.
Handmade in England, each by a single craftsman, the phones in question are a riot of luxury. The structure is in ceramic and titanium, the bearings in ruby and the circuits in gold and palladium. And then, as if that weren't enough, finishes in full-grain leather, steel, gold, precious stones and carbon fibers. To scratch the screen, made of sapphire crystals, a diamond would be needed. Which in any case, at the limit, would be part of the equipment of the cell phone. According to the latest tests, these phones that look like old diamond-encrusted Nokias won't break even if they're run over by a speeding car.
Luxury also includes a series of services worthy of the best sheikhs. Vertu Concierge is a kind of Aladdin's lamp: with a phone call you get concierge services, but also reservations, ideas or style advice. Whatever these words may mean. The service has been in operation since 2001 and it seems that the first request was a reservation for a London-New York flight.
Then there's Vertu City Brief, a travel guide with over 140 registered cities. Some malignant might say that there are much richer free apps, but the way to luxury does not pass through free content. The pinnacle is reached by Vertu Fortress, a backup service. Nothing new, some would say, the cloud is within everyone's reach. But nobody guarantees to protect your data on external servers placed in an underground bunker in England.
