After three years, Honor CEO Zhao Ming reproduced the famous scene of dropping his mobile phone at the press conference. But this time it was even more frightening, because he fell to the ground with a folding screen phone known for its expensive price and expensive screen.
In order to impact the high-end market, domestic mobile phone manufacturers are rolling up and dying, but they have a common strong enemy on the way forward - Apple. At the launch of almost all domestic high-end flagship models, there is an essential link, that is, to compare various parameters with Apple's latest annual model.
But on the folding screen, the situation of the above comparison began to be slightly different. Because Apple has not yet launched a folding screen model. According to media reports, Apple has tested a number of foldable iPhone prototypes internally, and the first folding screen mobile phone will be released as soon as 2023.
Before Apple, the domestic folding screen mobile phone market has become hot in advance. In 2021, xiaomi, OPPO, Huawei and other three brands have released folding screen products. Entering 2022, Honor's first shot of the first year focused on the folding screen, launched the first folding screen flagship mobile phone Magic V in the high-end Magic series, and shouted out the slogan to lead the folding screen into the main machine era.
More folding screen products are already on the way. According to network exposure information, vivo will also release the first folding screen mobile phone in 2022, and the second generation of Xiaomi folding screen may also appear within the year.
Domestic mobile phone manufacturers intensively release folding screen mobile phones, which means that China's high-end mobile phone market is growing.
According to the Rising Sun Big Data Report, in the third quarter of 2021, China's high-end mobile phone market share of more than $600 continued to expand to 32%, and it is predicted that it will exceed 40% in the fourth quarter.
In the past year when Huawei's mobile phones were pressed the growth pause button, the Chinese mobile phone market has taken turns to stage the drama of the city's changing king flag: January 2021 was OPPO first, March vivo became the new top of the list, and by October last year, Apple returned to The first place in China's sales after a gap of six years.
Glory after solo flights has become a dark horse for growth in 2021. Counterpoint announced that the share of Shipments in the Chinese market in Q3 2021 increased by 96% month-on-month, returning to the top three in the Chinese market with a 15% share.
The vacancy left by Huawei in the high-end market has not flowed into the pockets of domestic mobile phone manufacturers, but has made Apple the biggest beneficiary.
The idea that Huawei's empty market was naturally divided by several domestic brands was evaluated by Zhao Ming as "naïve and naïve". Zhao Ming said frankly that the core of the future glory high-end rise is to compete with Apple, and has formulated a plan to reach the top three in the global market.
Under the cyclical trough of homogeneous competition in the mobile phone industry, IT industry analyst Tang Ming believes that domestic mobile phone manufacturers can only find a first-line vitality for high-end breakthroughs if they maintain scientific and technological innovation.
From Apple, Samsung to Huawei, the three mobile phone manufacturers that have become high-end brands have all relied on their technical background and won market reputation and consumer recognition. Technological innovation has become an essential ability for domestic mobile phone manufacturers to impact the high-end. As a representative of technological innovation, the folding screen mobile phone is evolving into a high-end battle with Apple started by domestic mobile phone manufacturers in advance.
Innovating one step ahead of time is one of the powerful means for Chinese mobile phone manufacturers to break through Apple in recent years.
In October 2011, with the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs, a new wave of smartphone entrepreneurship arose in China: Lei Jun released a generation of Xiaomi mobile phones, Jia Yueting launched LeTV mobile phones, Luo Yonghao also brought hammer mobile phones...
One by one, "Chinese Jobs" have entered the field of mobile phones. In addition to imitating Apple from the design to the product function, most mobile phone manufacturers at this stage have chosen to deliberately avoid Apple's high-end price segment and rely on cost performance to win.
The transformation began in 2016. The global smartphone market ended its high-growth state, with a compound annual growth rate falling from double digits to single digits and soon entering negative growth.
The smartphone market, which has entered a mature stage, has to face the homogenization of products in the Red Sea. At this stage, the screen form has become the main competitive selling point of mobile phone manufacturers.
Apple, which has always been regarded as an innovation benchmark by domestic mobile phone manufacturers, has fallen into a circular game of continuously widening and lengthening the screen, and has been complained about by the outside world as "nesting doll innovation". Domestic mobile phone manufacturers that have grown up from imitation have begun to take over Apple's innovation baton, successively launched a series of screen innovation forms such as lifting, dual-track periscope, and dual-screen, and began to consciously challenge Apple's high-end status.
The folding screen is another latest attempt by domestic mobile phone manufacturers to innovate the shape of the screen. A new war for domestic mobile phone manufacturers to challenge Apple's high-end market has been fully rolled out around the definition, positioning and pricing rights of folding screen products.
Since jobs released the iPhone generation in 2007, relying on strong product innovation, the iPhone firmly controls the price fluctuations in the upstream and downstream of the supply chain, and every move can affect the rise and fall of Apple's supply chain enterprises, and it has successfully left an unquestionably strong point of attack in the minds of potential consumers - although expensive, Apple mobile phones are easier to use than Android mobile phones.
Apple, which has the right to speak in the industry, has naturally become the most profitable manufacturer in the mobile phone industry, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the profits of the global mobile phone market. Apple's market capitalization also rose all the way, becoming the first public company to break through $3 trillion in early January.
In terms of folding screens, Apple's domestic mobile phone brands have finally waited for an opportunity to seize the right to speak in the industry. To the current market folding screen program, has appeared in the screen folding, screen folding, screen bending, folding three folds and other schemes, and in advance to try which functions and scenes are suitable for folding screen, which interaction and operation are to be continued to improve, the late Apple in the folding form and folding technology, it is difficult to have a space for redefinition.
The arrival of Honor Magic V has once again brought a new industry standard to folding screen products. Honor Magic V became the first folding screen mobile phone equipped with a new generation of Snapdragon 8, with a 14.3mm ultra-thin body to become the thinnest folding mobile phone, or the first folding screen mobile phone that supports independent security memory chips, and is the largest folding screen mobile phone in many folding mobile phones, with the screen accounting for more than 90%. As a main mobile phone for daily use, Honor Magic V is on par with the flagship level and is expected to become a folding screen mobile phone with stronger practicality and higher performance in mass production folding screen mobile phones.
With the new product release activities of domestic mobile phone manufacturers, in the field of folding screen segmentation, domestic mobile phone manufacturers may be expected to create differentiated choice advantages, so as to leave a deep impression that the folding screen is equal to domestic mobile phones in the minds of consumers, and preemptively win the battle of this round of discourse power.
The battle for the right to speak between domestic mobile phone manufacturers and Apple has been staged more than once in the field of mobile phones.
In the wave of full screen before the folding screen, the domestic mobile phone manufacturers that preemptively launched various types of full-screen products by Apple once squeezed Apple out of the top five in the Chinese market by virtue of its leading innovation advantage.
2016 is regarded as the first year of the full screen opening, Xiaomi, Gionee, Huawei (Honor), OPPO, vivo and other domestic mobile phone manufacturers launched a series of products in advance. Apple was a year behind, and it wasn't until 2017 that it released its first full-screen phone, the iPhone X.
Also in this year, the Honor Magic series was officially unveiled, and a series of innovative attempts were made in the exploration of intelligent voice, intelligent interaction and full screen form.
The innovation pressure from domestic mobile phone manufacturers once led to a continuous decrease in the number of users upgrading to the new iPhone, which directly allowed Apple to take the initiative to lower its revenue forecast for the first quarter of 2019. In a letter to investors, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained the reasons in detail, saying that the main reason was that the scale of the slowdown in important emerging markets, especially in Greater China, was not expected, including in products such as the iPhone, Mac and iPad.
While Apple is busy calming investor sentiment, the global market share of domestic mobile phone manufacturers has gradually begun to catch up with Apple. This catch-up list once appeared in the figure of Huawei (including Glory) and Xiaomi.
In the five years that Apple stuck to the design of bangs, the full screen field has become a stage for domestic mobile phone manufacturers to compete for innovation. In order to infinitely approach 100% screen ratio, domestic mobile phone manufacturers, including Honor, began to start with the position of the earpiece and the front camera, explored new technologies such as perforated screens and under-screen cameras, and replaced the physical fingerprint recognition buttons with the fingerprint recognition scheme under the screen.
Apple even turned around to learn from domestic mobile phone manufacturers, such as black and white mode, 120Hz high screen refresh rate, optical zoom and so on.
The continuous iteration of domestic mobile phone manufacturers in technological innovation and the rush to full-screen products once impacted Apple's market share.
But the good times were short-lived. In the second quarter of 2021, Apple's iPhone performance rebounded sharply, with a growth rate of 50%, the highest growth rate since 2012. Cook attributes it to the 5G era of replacements. However, the outside world has seen the fall of Huawei, the leader of domestic mobile phones, which has brought direct help to Apple, and Tiger Sniff even directly used the expression "Huawei fell, Apple is full" in the title of the article.
Apple's "reality distortion force field" ability, which came after the wave of full screen, has actually been staged many times in the Jobs era, whether it is the iPod that came out in 2001, or the iPhone released in 2007, the iPad launched in 2010, and the AirPods unveiled in 2016.
Although Apple is not a pioneer in any category. But what is great is that under the leadership of Jobs, Apple can always redefine the product: through a new arrangement and combination, integrate the current most advanced technology, and then transform into an apple product with excellent experience, complete the market harvest, and become the No.1 in the field of subdivided products.
Apple has become a model of "disruptive innovation" over the past 20 years. The domestic mobile phone manufacturers in the wave of full screen missed an opportunity to break Apple's high-end monopoly situation.
Now, the battlefield of this high-end battle has moved to the folding screen.
After Huawei is weakened, who can stand up and become a new force for domestic high-end mobile phones?
This is also the answer that Honor, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo have been constantly seeking in the past two years.
According to a report by researcher Counterpoint, in the Chinese mobile phone market, the market share of high-end models is close to 25%, of which Apple accounts for 44%. In Tang Ming's view, as Huawei is forced to withdraw from this competition, once other domestic mobile phone manufacturers cannot make up for it in time, Apple's high-end share is likely to continue to expand.
After Apple's sales reached the top of the Chinese market in October last year, Glory CEO Zhao Ming said in an interview with The Times Weekly that there is no bad market, only bad response, there is a strong opponent, which should make the entire industry feel excited, can make the industry healthy competition, let the industry develop to a higher level, rather than forming an excessive "inner volume" to some extent.
In order to encourage the glory team that has just left Huawei for the first anniversary of independence, Zhao Ming specifically wrote that "the consumer goods market will never have a so-called big picture set... The power of subversive refactoring may be hidden in places we fail to see. ”
For the glory of the first anniversary of the new life, it is also facing the problem of how to establish the high-end image of the brand.
The first folding screen mobile phone Honor Magic V released on January 10 may be a battle for the cognitive highland that cannot be lost for glory.
Folding screen products will be one of the best carriers for Honor to impact high-end brands. The high cost of customized screens, the screen size of analog tablets, the limited sales conditions, etc., all show the high-end attributes of folding screens in the mobile phone industry. Not only glory, from Xiaomi to OPPO, behind the release of folding screens is all for the high-end of the brand.
From the experience of Apple, Samsung and Huawei, technological innovation is the underlying core ability of mobile phone branding. The folding screen faces high development costs, low yields, strong ecological cooperation, and all of them show that this is a strong scientific and technological attribute product that requires a lot of self-developed technical support.
Taking Honor Magic V as an example, the first ultra-thin suspended water droplet hinge is created, which includes 213 high-precision devices inside, so as to achieve the industry's thinnest hinge frame, with an opening and closing life of 200,000 times.
In the process of domestic mobile phone manufacturers shaping the high-end journey, the underlying innovation of the operating system is becoming more and more important. Honor Magic V debuted magic UI 6.0 system, which is officially known as the AI all-scenario intelligent operating system enabled by the Magic Live intelligent engine, with OS Turbo X, GPU Turbo X and LINK Turbo X technology performance engines, and strive to create a personalized OS suitable for everyone's habits.
For the current price that attracts the most attention from the outside world, the reason why folding screen mobile phones are expensive, on the one hand, is that different design languages for different mobile phone manufacturers need to be customized separately, and on the other hand, the yield of flexible screens that can be folded 180 ° is too low is also a big problem.
One of the solutions to these dilemmas is that more and more mobile phone manufacturers can enter the folding screen market segment and launch new products. "The so-called screen yield rate, ecological adaptation is not perfect, etc., in the final analysis, is still the market demand." As long as there is a large enough demand, these will not be a problem. Tang Ming said. The glory Magic V released this time has supported 100+ single application parallel horizon, 1000+ multi-application split-screen adaptation, of which top 100 applications 100% large-screen adaptation, TOP 1000 application 90% large-screen adaptation, folding screen fully meets the user's practical needs, into the main machine era.
Folding screen products from more mobile phone manufacturers will dilute the development costs of the upstream supply chain, and finally the price of folding screen mobile phones that flow to consumers will continue to decrease, and even gradually approach the price range of the current main machine. The release of honor Magic V has added another fire to promote the folding screen mobile phone into the era of the main machine.
In any case, in the past decade, the high-end market monopolized by Samsung and Apple is being hit by more and more cracks by domestic mobile phone manufacturers.