Recently, Luo Yonghao's painting style has changed again.
Other anchors with goods are busy impacting double eleven and double twelve, while "Luo anchors" are in Cao Ying's heart in Han. As long as you look at the short video account of "make a friend", it is not difficult to find that the short video shooting on this account has almost no figure of Luo Yonghao. Counting the content recently released by Luo Yonghao's Weibo, it can be found that in addition to the sporadic list of goods, more content is to comment on the technology circle, from Apple and Hammer to the hottest metaverse of the moment. For a moment, you can't even tell if he's standing up for future business or "not doing the right thing."
Fortunately, the answer to the question came quickly. In the early morning of December 16, Luo Yonghao, the founder of Hammer Technology, posted on Weibo that in order to welcome the next high-tech entrepreneurship, he listened to hundreds of American talk shows on the treadmill, making it clear that he was about to return to the technology industry. It is worth noting that when interacting with netizens, Luo Yonghao revealed that after returning to the technology industry, he will be involved in VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), MR (mixed reality) fields.
In fact, Luo Yonghao has said many times on Weibo that he will return to the technology industry track to start a business after paying off his debts. Now it seems that he himself is ready to start a second venture. So the question is, after two years of comeback, why did Luo Yonghao choose this entrepreneurial direction? After repeated failures, can Luo Yonghao, who has regained his strength, make a comeback this time?
Luo Yonghao has a VR dream?
For the industry, Luo Yonghao's desire to do VR has long been an "open secret".
In July 2015, Luo Zixiong, the design director of Hammer, posted a Weibo post on the recruitment of talents, saying that he was preparing a challenging new project. Although this Weibo did not reveal more information about the project, judging from the actual recruits, this is likely to be the recruitment plan of hammer's internal VR team. This Weibo also "inadvertently" tied the hammer and VR together.
In the following year, Hammer Technology continued to increase investment in the VR field. According to media reports, Hammer Technology first cooperated with Nuoyiteng to establish a VR interaction laboratory, funded by the former, the latter provided technology, and then posted a recruitment notice on Weibo, clearly stating that the VR team recruited talents, and finally Luo Yonghao himself directly indicated on Weibo that the hammer mobile phone is about to enter the VR field.
Team expansion, technology accumulation, CEO warm-up, all the clues seem to point to Hammer's upcoming VR products. Unfortunately, as Luo Zixiong, the head of the Hammer VR project, left to start his own business, the important member of the Hammer VR project, the software engineer Guan Mo Jie, and the UI designer Yi Ningkang left their jobs, and the situation suddenly took a sharp turn. In the end, at the Hammer M1 conference, Luo Yonghao did not mention the hammer VR expected by the outside world, and the expectations of all hammer fans seemed to end here.
However, although the Hammer VR project ended in difficult childbirth, Luo Yonghao's VR heart has not died. In 2017, Luo Yonghao participated in Luo Zhenyu's interview program "Long Talk", in which Luo Yonghao made it clear that he wanted to lead a technological revolution in his lifetime, just like personal computers and smart phones, and he believed that this technological revolution would soon come. The product that "leads the technological revolution" mentioned here is naturally VR equipment.
Luo Yonghao's remarks could not help but make people think of it. Unfortunately, the weak hammer could not support Luo Yonghao's overly large ideal after all. In 2018, Hammer Technology announced that it was heavily indebted due to poor management; in 2019, the Hammer Technology mobile phone team was acquired by ByteDance; in 2020, ByteDance announced that the New Stone Laboratory formed by the original Hammer Technology team was merged into the education hardware research team.
Throughout its life, Hammer Technology has never produced even a VR device, not even a VR prototype.
Looking back now, Hammer Technology actually dared to put the company's internal R& D manpower on the fledgling VR industry in the case of the rapid decline of its main business, and had to admire Luo Yonghao's courage. Unfortunately, even in the highly mature mobile phone industry, The Hammer Technology led by Luo Yonghao will still encounter many problems such as production capacity crisis, mobile phone quality and foundry closure. Such a company wants to make a name for itself in a whole new field, which is somewhat a bit of a fool's dream.
Why AR/VR?
What is somewhat surprising is that this time back, Luo Yonghao resolutely and resolutely put the goal of secondary entrepreneurship in the field of AR/VR/MR. Many netizens saw this news and said that they could not understand, it was difficult to pay off the debt, Luo Yonghao's second venture was not from his familiar mobile phone industry to start over, in the end AR / VR has what kind of magic, can Luo Yonghao remember this?
Luo Yonghao is reluctant to return to the mobile phone market, naturally there is a reason. According to gartner data from industry research institute, the total shipments of the global mobile phone market fell again in the third quarter of 2021, down 6.8% compared with the same period in 2020. In other words, the competition of the smart phone industry itself has already entered the stage of stock competition, in which case users will gather more to the head brand, and the living space of small manufacturers has seriously shrunk.
In contrast, since entering 2021, due to the impact of the listing of the ONLINE game platform Roblox in the United States and the renaming of the well-known social platform Facebook to Meta, the term "metaverse" has quickly caught fire. Regardless of whether you have learned about the metaverse before, you must have seen or heard more or less news about the metaverse during this time, such as various popular science content on video platforms, and various hot topics where corporate leaders expressed their views on the definition of "metacosm".
Many companies related to or even related to the meta-universe have also benefited from this meta-universe wave, and their stock prices have risen continuously. As the theoretical entrance to the "metaverse", the VR/AR field has naturally become one of the development directions of many metaverse entrants, and the market that once returned to silence has been speculated by investors again, becoming a hot blue ocean in the technology industry.
In the case of the rapid heating up of the VR market, Luo Yonghao announced that it was natural to return to the AR/VR/MR field for a second venture. Realistically, with the help of this "meta-universe" east wind, Luo Yonghao's second venture should progress more smoothly than expected in attracting investment, and can also attract more media and consumer attention.
More importantly, in addition to the relatively bright performance of HTC/Oculus, there are still no fixed hegemons in the AR/VR field. This is a brand new track, the next universal computing platform after the mobile phone, there is no Samsung Huawei Xiaomi, there is no so-called public aesthetic, and there is no Steve Jobs who covers everyone's light. The market is blank, the users are ignorant, the opportunities are open, and this is exactly what Luo Yonghao needs.
What are the odds of winning this time?
So, Luo Yonghao's next scene to do AR/VR, can it be achieved?
Industry insiders said that although the "meta-universe" wind prevails today, AR/VR is also generally considered by manufacturers to be the next crazy, but the entire industry is still in the pure burning money exploration period until today, Luo Yonghao does not have the qualifications to compete at this stage.
The reason is very simple, first of all, although AR/VR is hyped up in the industry, its industrial maturity (technology, channels, market, supply chain, etc.) is far less than that of personal computers, smart phones and other industries, for Luo Yonghao, who is halfway out of the house, how to produce a VR device that can be used is already a challenge, and it is difficult to produce a VR device that can be comparable to the mainstream equipment on the market.
Secondly, now various technology giants have laid out the "meta-universe", making the entire AR/VR market more competitive. OPPO, Xiaomi and TCL are actively exploring the AR glasses market; Tencent is preparing AR and VR equipment; Ali has set up an XR laboratory dedicated to exploring AR, VR and meta-universe technologies; AndByteDance has acquired Pico, a domestic VR head manufacturer. In addition to Meta, foreign Google, Microsoft and NVIDIA also have their own layouts.
Finally, from the current market development situation, the above mainstream AR/VR vendors are trying to attract developers to build their own ecosystems while launching AR/VR hardware. The reason why these manufacturers can attract a large number of developers to develop applications for their AR/VR devices is closely related to their market position, brand influence and scale in their respective industries.
In contrast, Luo Yonghao used to rely more on his own personal brand in the mobile phone industry to attract users to buy. At the moment when the hammer is falling, the appeal of this brand has been diluted, and the new company of the second venture will not have any reputation in the industry, and it is difficult to call on developers/application manufacturers to join their own ecosystem construction. Therefore, even if Luo Yonghao's future VR devices have no major problems in hardware, the lack of content and application is also a threshold that is difficult to cross.
To sum up, although the "meta-universe" is indeed the most popular concept in the current field of science and technology, for Luo Yonghao, it is still unknown whether the second entrepreneurship can stand on the cusp of the wind and take off. If a startup wants to continue to grow, it needs more calm and pragmatic. How to do their own products well, how to find the right positioning to deal with the competition of technology giants, this is a problem that Luo Yonghao and other manufacturers of the same size need to think carefully.