Luxury phone brand Vertu is shutting down

Vertu, a company that has been synonymous with luxury smartphones priced into the thousands of dollars, has seen its final days.

FT reports that, following the purchase of Vertu by Murat Hakan Uzan in March of this year, the company is being liquidated. That means that 200 jobs will be lost after a prominent attempt by the company to save itself by slashing prices of its smartphones quite a bit.

The report says that after Uzan purchased Vertu, he discovered that the company had an accounting deficit of £128 million. While Uzan did attempt to buy back the company before it was officially put into administration, it was ultimately unsuccessful.

Uzan will hold onto the Vertu brand along with its design licenses and technologies, and it’s said that he plans on trying to rebuild the Vertu name at some point in the future.

Vertu has been a name that’s been around since 1998 back when it was a part of Nokia, but it has always dealt in super luxury handsets that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Those handsets were typically wrapped in leather and clad with jewels and other high-end components. Vertu has reportedly sold half a million devices since its inception which, despite the length of time, is still noteworthy considering the high prices of the devices.

Have you ever seen a Vertu phone in the wild?

source: androidandme