Chinese mobile phone manufacturers are engaged in intensive firefights in this field

Image source: Visual China

Competition from Chinese mobile phone manufacturers is entering the deep water zone.

If you have a little memory, you can think of it, before the mobile phone manufacturers' conference, most manufacturers will mention: running points, cameras, operating system improvements, etc., keywords, almost nothing involved in the chip.

That situation has now been broken. Yesterday and today, OPPO released new products for two consecutive days, launching the Mariana MariSilicon X chip, smart glasses, and a folding screen mobile phone Find N.

Chen Mingyong, the founder of low-key OPPO, also appeared: "Technology companies must solve key problems through key technologies, and if there is no underlying core technology, there can be no future; and the flagship product without the underlying core technology is a castle in the air." ”

Chips have always been considered the pearl in the crown of the communication field, before Huawei, Xiaomi, vivo have tried to make a breakthrough in the chip field, and now OPPO has also joined the competition camp.

Compared with Huawei and Xiaomi, OPPO has always been relatively low-key, but its sales are huge. According to the smartphone market share data released by Canalys in the third quarter of 2021, the top 5 global smartphone market share in the third quarter were occupied by overseas Samsung, Apple and domestic brands Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo. With its own supply chain and international brand advantages, Samsung and Apple won the top two on the list, which is actually not surprising, but it is worth noting that in the list of top5 head mobile phone manufacturers, OPPO achieved contrarian growth in the Q3 quarter, and the increase was as high as 18%.

Unlike emerging Internet mobile phone brands such as OPPO and Xiaomi, oppo has firmly occupied offline channels from the beginning. Although low-key, it cannot ignore its strong competitiveness. Nowadays, it seems that no matter what Chinese mobile phone brand, it is the same way to compete in the chip field.

According to Chen Mingyong's statement, OPPO's chip strategy can be seen: as OPPO's first image-specific NPU chip independently designed and developed, Mariana MariSilicon X is the world's first mobile independent NPU using a 6nm advanced process. It is reported that the OPPO core-making plan has been carried out for at least 2 years, and in 2019, the first official announcement of the establishment of a chip research and development team, planning to invest 50 billion yuan in research and development in 3 years, in addition to this Mariana chip, OPPO is also developing other chips, including signal processors, baseband chips, etc. "OPPO's self-developed chip project has been advancing, and the team has thousands of people, and self-developed chips are the focus of OPPO's future research and development." Chen Mingyong said.

Predictably, the evolution of the underlying technology will not happen overnight. Up to now, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo, which rank in the top four Chinese mobile phones, have all entered the chip field, after Xiaomi launched its self-developed surging C1 chip, Vivo launched its self-developed vivo V 1 chip, Huawei's Kirin chip, and now OPPO's Mariana chip.

The input of various families is also increasing. Huawei's research and development of chips is the earliest, the industrial chain is relatively complete, and several others have various investments to win time. According to incomplete statistics, since 2018, Xiaomi has invested in more than 40 semiconductor companies, including Wi-Fi chips, RF chips, MCU sensors, IGBT chips and FPGAs, including a number of chip products; and OPPO has also invested in many chip companies such as Jiekai Technology, Lingming Photons, Ruishi Chuangxin and Weirong Technology.

It can be expected that in the future, the competition of Chinese mobile phone manufacturers will bid farewell to the conventional competition of previous prices and channels, and products and underlying technologies and chip research and development will become an intensive firefight area, which is the only way for any great company. (Fortune Chinese Network)