Running a smartphone business is hard, and the list of dead manufacturers is enormous. There’s Nokia, BlackBerry, Microsoft, LG, Palm, and many more. These brands either died because they supported the wrong operating system or because they simply didn’t have the resources to compete with top players like Samsung.
Then there’s the shuttered Chinese manufacturer Gionee. It didn’t die because of bad technological choices or because it was squeezed out by rivals. It’s widely believed that the manufacturer died because its chairman gambled away millions of dollars of the company’s money.