Text | Rust-free bowl
"The glorious quest has only just begun."
On the evening of January 10, Honor CEO Zhao Ming said sincerely to his users.
In nearly two hours, the real spokesperson of the glory brand, as usual, no ridicule, no excitement, the most heart-wrenching moment of the whole scene, appeared when he "dropped" the folding screen mobile phone worth ten thousand yuan in his hand to the ground - yes, he fell twice to prove that his folding screen "resistant to falling", and the importance of this mobile phone is self-evident for the current glory.
This act is "honorable". Moving trucks from Shenzhen to Beijing explain that Glory is "resistant to falls", and a legendary salary slip calculated with an Excel form also shows that Glory is "resistant to falling".
But that wasn't the case before.
A year ago, on the first anniversary of Glory's independence, a fan asked Zhao Ming: "What is Glory's next market goal?" ”
At that time, Zhao Ming replied: "Like Huawei, we have made our own contributions to China's scientific and technological development." This passage was intercepted by many media in the days to come, and labeled as "afraid to respond positively".
Huawei's sudden exit has plunged the industry into a lack of "cores", while the growth of the smartphone market seems to have peaked: nearly 4 billion smartphones have been installed in the world's 5.5 billion adults. International research firm Canalys claims that global smartphone shipments fell by 6% in the third quarter of 2021.
Black swans and grey rhinos are simultaneously present in the most market-oriented industry – consumers around the world almost use their wallets to vote for their own brands.
No one knows what kind of ups and downs Zhao Ming, who is standing in the spotlight at this time today, is experiencing ups and downs in his heart: the only certainty is that the darkness before dawn seems to have passed - last summer, with the release of the Honor 50 and Magic 3 series mobile phones, counterpoint Research report data immediately: August Glory China sales increased by 18% year-on-year, market share reached 15%, once again among the top three in China, millet, Apple was listed in the "other" One of them.
V, in the convention is the abbreviation of "Victory", Glory this time the folding screen mobile phone as "Magic V", obviously trying to in this smartphone "future battle" just kicked off, it will be hammered out.
Again, this is an inward-rolling market.
The folding screen was just born and rolled inside
"Mingo hasn't dropped a cell phone in years." As soon as the voice fell, the mobile phone in Zhao Ming's hand fell freely, and before everyone could react, the mobile phone that had just been picked up fell freely again.
In the eyes of many users, the folding screen mobile phone is still a "rare thing", and in a trance, it has been rolled into a "fall-resistant" item.
Back in time to 2019.
Quan Guixian, then president of Samsung Electronics Greater China, shouted out the sentence: "Those who have to fold the screen will get the world", may not think that the new technology between this foot and square will bring such a huge impact and change to the future Chinese mobile phone market.
In this lengthy list of folding screen products, you can see a series of familiar names such as Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, Royole, etc., and counting the glory of this shot, most of the brands in the Android circle are almost among them.
Corresponding to this macro-frenzy is the brand's confusion at the micro level.
"What exactly does a folding screen phone mean?" This problem, for a long time in the past, has been the sword of Damocles hanging above the heads of all brands, invisibly oppressing the common anxiety and confusion of the industry.
A notable example comes from OPPO, whose folding screen product, Find N, was released on the day, and Chief Product Officer Liu Zuohu shouted on Weibo that this was "the most exciting product" after his return, and said that "it can definitely be used as a main machine".
After the routine speech was finished, the reporter turned his head to interview, but it exposed his inner hesitation:
"Until 2018, when I saw the folding screen mobile phone came out, I didn't think clearly about what different experiences and different values it had."
OPPO's internal employees revealed to the media that in private, Liu Zuohu's most commented on this mobile phone is not technology, scene and hardware, but "the feel is very good".
With Liu Zuohu, who has the same confusion, there is also Xiaomi's Lei Jun.
On March 29 last year, in the second session of the Xiaomi Spring New Product Launch Conference with the theme of "Endless Life", Lei Jun, wearing a gray suit, officially released the MIX FOLD Xiaomi folding screen mobile phone.
But just a year ago, in an interview with the media, Lei Jun also questioned the prospects of this category: "The mass production of folding screen mobile phones is not good enough", "The battery inside is pitiful, a few folds, that space is occupied." ”
This contrast between the attitude before and after was also the norm for many mobile phone brands at that time - in the huge folding screen race, too many brands were wrapped up in it without time to think, in order to compete for release speed and parameters, there were countless stories of lamentation.
Many people still remember that on the last day of October 2018, Liu Zihong, chairman of Royole Technology, stood on the stage of the National Convention Center and blew a breath at the cicada wing flexible screen, and the original vertical screen began to swing like a piece of paper.
Before Xiaomi and other major mobile phone manufacturers, Royole's world's first foldable mobile phone FlexPai was born.
Corresponding to technology is the dismal bleakness of the forerunners. Three years later, "child prodigy" entrepreneur Liu Zihong forwarded an article in the circle of friends titled "Musk Recalls the Brink of Bankruptcy: Waking Up Every Day and Crying in a Dream all night."
No wonder Li Nan, who bid farewell to the mobile phone industry, said, "The trillion-level smartphone market has attracted countless geniuses, leaders and scammers to appear one after another and compete."
The disturbing situation may be coming true: folding screen mobile phones that have not yet "sold well" have thus entered the "era of inner volume".
Folding screen in one hand, operating system in the other
At the same time as the outlet returned to the sober, the past fanaticism for folding screens has also been re-examined.
After experiencing the "concept" of the unknown cloud and the flashy "showmanship" and "stacking" era, people suddenly found that in the market, folding screen mobile phones that really aim at user needs and take into account user experience are so rare.
According to a previous industry survey, 44.6% of consumers believe that the reason for the failure of folding screen mobile phones to be popularized is "poor experience".
This is also why, at this press conference, Zhao Ming chose to give Glory Magic V a new definition that has never been seen before: "One is in place." ”
Behind the simple sentence, it is not only Glory's deep thinking about the future folding screen, but also their deep understanding of user needs.
Objectively speaking, honor Magic V brings revolutionary innovation breakthroughs from three dimensions: folding form, performance experience and application scenarios.
Folding mobile phone is most concerned about the nature of the folding screen, this time Glory in the premise of ensuring top performance and large-screen experience, to create the industry's most slim horizontal folding machine - these are from honor's self-developed technology. In order to ensure that the hinge mechanism has higher accuracy and strength, while having a lighter weight, honor Magic V rarely uses aerospace-grade materials. Clearly, Honor's strong supply chain plays a role.
In addition to the extremely thin and light body, the top of the new generation of Snapdragon 8 mobile platform and excellent internal and external screen, the Honor Magic UI 6.0 operating system is also with the Honor Magic V, giving the mobile phone a more extreme experience.
In fact, at the press conference, Zhao Ming spent a lot of time to introduce the new Magic UI 6.0 operating system. As he said in his final summary, "Honor will go out of a development path that is different from existing manufacturers and brands in the software experience."
This insight comes from a new competitive landscape. After the failure of "Moore's Law", the "squeeze ointment" innovation of smart phone hardware can no longer stimulate consumers, and how to mobilize the "spirituality" of users' mobile phones has become a new martial arts secret.
The official news said that unlike the past single-point AI capability upgrade, Honor Magic UI 6.0 has injected new vitality into each module of the Magic UI system under the blessing of the real-time online perception, understanding and learning ability of the Magic Live intelligent engine. It brings three dimensions of intelligent experience upgrades: Magic Live+ scene experience, Magic Live+ basic OS and Magic Live+ cross-device OS.
Although Huawei lost the mobile phone hardware, relying on "Hongmeng" still shows a strong "dominance" in the jianghu, which also encourages Honor - proving the excellent market share and deep understanding of application scenarios, and there are also great opportunities for Honor Magic UI.
Behind this game of chess, Glory's greater ambition is that in the future, Honor Magic UI will be divided from Apple's IOS and Huawei Hongmeng.
Glory's "Genetic Recombination"
In the high-tech park of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Koreans are dominating everything here.
Although the epidemic has challenged the operation of Samsung's factories, its revenue has increased by 15% year-on-year. This year, the South Koreans will also add three foldable OLED module production lines non-stop.
Nothing can prove more than this that the spring of the folding screen market is coming, even if the folding screen is not yet the "mainstream product" in terms of industry shipments and profits.
But after spelling charging, pinning sound effects, fighting screens, and spelling cameras, the only battlefield for each show muscle is the folding screen.
The advent of a folding screen mobile phone requires high research and development costs, more expensive parts procurement, and more complex software system adaptation. This means that brands that have the ability to develop folding screen mobile phones need not only technology research and development capabilities, supply chain coordination capabilities, and software ecological collaboration capabilities, but also have a heart that is brave to challenge.
In the past, ren Zhengfei said in his speech to bid farewell to glory, he said that glory should "be Huawei's strongest competitor in the world, surpass Huawei, and even shout to overthrow Huawei and become a self-motivating slogan for you." ”
Hypothetical slogans are becoming a reality unconsciously.
While ushering in comprehensive evolution in design, research and development, hardware, software, supply chain and other aspects, the advent of the Honor Magic V folding screen also marks the glory of tearing off the "Huawei label" and is proving that it has consolidated the position of the "first echelon" in the field of smart phones.
Unlike many people who think, Honor can easily take over the huge market left by Huawei after leaving the market. In fact, the difficult situation faced by Glory at the beginning of independence far exceeded market expectations.
Online or offline, high-end or cost-effective, completely autonomous or "time for space"... This is not only a problem in front of the glory at that time, but also a myth that has long plagued the market.
To some extent, what Glory experienced in the two years after independence can also be seen as a microcosm of the thinking of China's smartphone industry in the past two decades.
The glory after independence, reorganizing the supply chain, starting a business for the second time, chose a "correct but difficult" path. This "self-help behavior initiated by the glory-related industrial chain" is equivalent to rebirth.
The previous glory, the public perception is Huawei's sub-brand, and now the glory, it seems to have completed the "genetic recombination".
The gene of "focusing on research and development" given by Huawei's system is still retained, on the other hand, the market power of the "integration" of agents and dealers has given the new glory efficient action and keen market perception.
At the Honor 50 conference in Shanghai last year, Zhao Ming used a string of numbers to prove the combat effectiveness of "genetic recombination":
After 66 days of Honor's independence, it resumed cooperation with major partners in the global supply chain; 134 days, the integration was fully completed, opening a comprehensive sprint of new strategies; 185 days, it was announced that it was about to launch the world's first product equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G mobile platform; 211 days, honor 50 series was released, injecting living water into dry channels.
Therefore, this has the confidence of Zhao Ming in the magic V conference, many times with "one in place" to card the folding screen mobile phone, and the pricing of 9999 yuan also "let the folding screen mobile phone enter the main machine era" Has the possibility of the market.
The "anti-fragile" rushed out of the siege
In 2012, five years after the publication of Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's anti-fragility book was published.
Wall Street's most legendary hedge fund manager — and now a best-selling author , has come up with a new understanding: risk can't be avoided in advance, and only by understanding risk and improving your anti-fragility can you take advantage of risk and reap the benefits.
"Some things benefit from shocks, and when exposed to volatility, randomness and uncertainty, they can thrive and thrive."
In a way, "anti-fragility" also happens to be a footnote to Glory's trajectory in recent years.
In the world of black swans, Taleb believes that the back of the "age of uncertainty" coin is anti-fragile. Compared with the resilience and resilience repeatedly emphasized by management scholars today, in the fog of the times, an anti-fragile enterprise is more able to cope with unknown risks.
This is the key to Glory's ability to survive the trough and rebound quickly.
From the highly anticipated after independence, to the stable internal strength of the dormant period, and then to the rebirth of the fire today, the story of glory confirms the view that has been circulating in the smartphone industry for many years:
"Making a mobile phone is not a temporary list ranking, but a long run without an end."
For brands in this long run, after a long "cost-effective" duel, they have entered the high-end and gone overseas, surpassing the head international brands represented by Apple and Samsung, and have also become the "key battle" that determines the upper limit of China's smartphone industry.
On the competitive stage of the global mobile phone market, people in the industry have a quite vivid metaphor, as the "Iron Throne" that firmly occupies the market share of the "Iron Throne", Samsung plays the "opening role", Apple is the "role of the finale singer", while the major domestic mobile phone manufacturers, despite their own advantages, but the sense of existence is still not high.
People who hold this view often cite data to support it. According to DIGIMIES Research data, the top two global smartphone shipments in 2021 are still Samsung and Apple.
But an easy to overlook detail is that if you carefully analyze the competitive advantages of Samsung and Apple, the supply chain and technology ecology behind it will become the core keywords.
Judging from the sales data, in 2021, nearly 80% of the folding screen mobile phone sales contributed to Samsung's defense of the "Iron Throne". Behind this is not only the historical position of Samsung's "first folding screen mobile phone commercial precedent", but also Samsung's most complete folding mobile phone supply chain team in the world, this strong supply chain control ability, providing a foundation for shipment volume and product innovation.
Although folding screen mobile phones have not yet been launched, Apple folding screens may become one of the important variables in the mobile phone market.
Because one of the core pain points of the current folding screen mobile phone is the lack of just-needed applications and ecological advantages. With the advantage of software and hardware ecological integration, Apple is expected to use folding mobile phones to realize the ecological interconnection between mobile phones, tablets and laptops in the future, and accelerate the blurring of the gap between mobile phones, PCs and tablets.
The glory after "genetic recombination", technology ecology and supply chain are its important advantages. Therefore, in the long run, Honor may be able to rank among the top three list of mobile phone manufacturers.
This may also be why, in a previous interview, Honor executives said: "In terms of meeting the needs of Chinese consumers, Honor should do better than Apple." ”
This is an uphill battle that domestic mobile phones have to face.
Whether it is the previous blockade of Huawei or Apple's elimination of domestic supply chain brands, the market has realized the deep binding of "the same honor and disgrace, the common destiny" between domestic mobile phone brands and mobile phone industry chain suppliers. Only if domestic brands really successfully "block" Apple and Samsung from the high-end, the domestic mobile phone industry has the possibility of rapid development.
At this time, competitors have also begun to step by step, after two consecutive months of stable domestic market single-machine sales first, Apple still adopted a price reduction model, pointing to the high-end market share of domestic brands.
However, in addition to the strong strength, domestic brands are not without chances, from the perspective of the industry, high-end mobile phones are not in high pricing, nor in the marketing investment, the ultimate point is the consumer's recognition of the brand, and the differentiated experience of the product.
As Zhao Ming said at the press conference, "We will adhere to the ultimate concept of productism, combine scientific and technological innovation with the needs of consumers, and continue to move forward on the road of innovation and exploration."
Although the future of this key battle is still difficult to assert at present, it does not seem to affect the confidence of domestic brands
In that interview a month ago, in front of the camera, Zhao Ming's response seemed to be somewhat categorical:
"Honor must become a great product company, we use products and innovation to win the respect of the market and consumers."