Today the social enterprise Fairphone launched its first crowdfunding campaign for community investors with the opportunity to become a shareholder of the company. The campaign will run via the crowdfunding platform Oneplanetcrowd, which is specialising in crowdfunding in the area of social entrepreneurship. Investors have the opportunity to invest from 250 to over 5,000 euro into the company. The campaign is aimed to attract 1 million euro in investment with a cap on 2.5 million euro. With the investment community members have the opportunity to benefit from the growth of the company and support Fairphone to increase the impact it creates across the supply chain. It will first run privately to give Fairphone community members the possibility to invest up to 1 million euro with privileged access. Afterwards it will be available publicly a few days later on the investment page via this link. In the meantime anyone can sign up to be notified when it goes public.
Community driven and community owned Fairphone has already attracted 6.5 million euro from impact investors in 2017 alone and is now opening up the possibility to invest in the company to its community. While previous investments that came with the possibility of being a shareholder were only open to larger impact investors this investment round is specifically open also for investors that contribute smaller amounts starting at 250 euro. Investors will receive 5% return annually on their investment and can decide to convert their investment into shares, which will diversify the ownership of the company.
Bas van Abel, CEO of Fairphone: ‘Fairphone has created a market for more ethical and sustainable electronic products and is now scaling its impact further. We have been able to do this also thanks to our community, who have made it clear that they care about the issues related to electronic supply chains. With this investment round we want to open up the possibility to benefit from Fairphone’s growth especially to our community.
Investing into impact Fairphone is a pioneer in creating social impact in electronics supply chains and the development of more sustainable and fair products. With the creation of the first modular smartphone, the integration of Fairtrade gold into its supply chain and the sourcing of all conflict minerals from conflict free sources Fairphone is setting new standards in the industry. With the investment Fairphone aims to create more fairness on all levels by expanding the number of minerals with a fairer supply chain and the people that benefit from these improvements. As first concrete next steps Fairphone will work on creating a fairer supply chain for cobalt, a mineral needed for the production of batteries.
