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- Smart lighting company Buddy Technologies (BUD) will launch a low price, white smart light, dubbed “LIFX White”
- The company intends this light to be the most accessible and easy to use smart light on the market for just $15
- LIFX White is aiming to address two of the major issues with smart lights- high costs and installation difficulties
- The product is expected to be on the market in the second quarter of 2020
- On the market this morning, Buddy is up 4.17 per cent and is trading at 2.5 cents apiece
Buddy Technologies (BUD) will launch a new low price white smart light, called LIFX White.
The company intends this light to be the most accessible and easy to use smart light on the market for a target price of US$9.99 (approximately $15).
LIFX White is aiming to address two of the major issues with smart lights – cost and setup/installation difficulty.
This new product will be sold around the world and goes in line with Buddy’s 2020 goals. Retail partners have already ordered large volumes of the light and the company has a manufacturing order of 500,000 lights.
“While order forecasts from retail partners have historically been a very accurate measure of their future ordering behaviours, an order forecast does not bind a retailer to order in that quantity,” the company said.
“We couldn’t be more pleased to be bringing this new LIFX White to market, and hope to disrupt the whole smart light category in doing so,” CEO David McLauchlan, said.
To help with the set-up, LIFX White will support a range of new Amazon connectivity technologies, including a simple set-up technology that will automatically associate the light with a customers home wireless network.
For customers with an Amazon Echo (Alexa) in their home, this will make the set-up experience as simple as screwing the lightbulb into a fixture.
“It is possible to get to this price point and maintain our margins only with the kind of global volume that our retail partners around the world can provide us, not to mention the vast improvement in the setup experience Amazon provides with their simple setup technologies for smart devices in the Alexa ecosystem,” David told the market.
Last month at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Amazon announced there are now “hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices”. This is
up from 100 million in 2019.
This includes Amazon’s own brand of Echo devices, as well as third-party Alexa, built-in products.
Buddy expects to introduce this product in the second quarter of 2020 and is currently making arrangements with supply chains to ensure production is at full capacity in time for a launch in the U.S. and European summer.
On the market this morning, Buddy is up 4.17 per cent and is trading at 2.5 cents apiece at 1:06 pm AEDT.
