At the end of the year, mobile phone manufacturers opened the competition for high-end machines Self-research and innovation may become the key to the breakthrough of domestic mobile phones

Cover news reporter Lei Qiang

Near the end of the year, mobile phone manufacturers opened the last wave of new machines.

On December 28, Xiaomi officially launched the high-end new Xiaomi 12 series, which for the first time planned a large and a small "double-size double-high-end" specification. Lei Jun, founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group, said that in the next five years, Xiaomi will invest 100 billion yuan in research and development funds, and officially benchmark Apple in product strategy and learn from Apple. He also said that the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro benchmarks the iPhone 13 Pro Max, and the Xiaomi Mi 12 benchmarks the iPhone 13.

Following the announcement in August this year of the new goal of "winning the world's first in three years", Xiaomi's first dual-size, dual-high-end co-hair, which is also the first time Xiaomi has proposed to benchmark Apple, and continue to impact the global high-end market with technological innovation. Earlier, Lei Jun said on Weibo that Xiaomi wants to grab more market share in the high-end market and needs to learn from Apple. But in fact, not only xiaomi, which also wants to share a piece of the pie, including OPPO, vivo, and glory after leaving Huawei, are aimed at the big cake of the high-end market.

In September this year, OPPO vice president Liu Bo said, "Today there are only two high-end brands in the mobile phone market, Apple and Huawei, and OPPO hopes to become the third in the future, and we firmly believe that the future high-end market will be 'three points of the world'." OPPO is indeed accelerating the exploration of the high-end market, on December 14, OPPO released the first self-developed chip Mariana MariSilicon X in Shenzhen, OPPO founder and CEO Chen Mingyong revealed that OPPO's high-end flagship Find X latest series will take the lead in carrying the chip, which is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2022.

On December 22, the vivo S12 series was officially released, as vivo's new generation of pioneer image flagship, the whole series of rear 100 million pixels super clear main camera, vivo S12 Pro is equipped with the annual flagship core Tianji 1200, adding bricks and tiles to vivo mobile phones to obtain a larger market share. This time, Xiaomi released a 12 series of new machines, equipped with Snapdragon 8 Gen1 chip, using a grip size of 69.9mm, the first self-developed Xiaomi surging P1 charging chip, to achieve the industry's first large-capacity single battery 120W safe fast charge.

It can be seen that with the continuous upgrading of user spending power, the high-end smartphone market has become more and more important to domestic brands, and the strategic vision of mobile phone manufacturers is no longer satisfied with the low-price range, after Huawei, xiaomi, OV, glory and other brands are trying to further subdivide the high-end market in order to obtain more shares. With the efforts of major manufacturers, who can finally win is still unknown.

In addition, according to Canalys data, Xiaomi's global market share in the third quarter was 13.5%, ranking third, compared with 16.7% in the second quarter. In a conference call after the release of the third quarter earnings report, Xiaomi executives said that Xiaomi's market share in the third quarter has declined, mainly related to the strong performance of the iPhone 13 after the release of the new product.

Some insiders said that Samsung's recovery weakened Xiaomi's growth ability in Europe in the third quarter, while OPPO and Glory had a strong growth momentum in China. In the face of the double blow from domestic and foreign mobile phone manufacturers, Xiaomi's 5G smartphone sales growth in the third quarter slowed down significantly. After the release of Xiaomi 12, its high-end product line will also become more abundant, coupled with the layout of key devices, Xiaomi is expected to further break through in the high-end mobile phone market with new machines.