2022 of domestic mobile phones: a reconciliation between "self" and "superego"?

Wen 丨 Morgan Channel

In the blink of an eye into 2022, on the one hand, Apple has become the world's first company with a market value of more than 3 trillion US dollars, and on the other hand, domestic mobile phone manufacturers are ready to go, with arrows on the string, entering the domestic mobile phone 3.0 era.

Then, who can stand out this year and replace Huawei and Apple with a battle; or for domestic mobile phones, in the post-smart phone era, getting rid of the inner volume and reconciling with the "self" may be the brand's new "antidote".

In the post-smartphone era, there is no "ceiling"?

The war on domestic mobile phones in 2021 has come to an end with time. From 2007 to 2022, 15 years, the global mobile phone industry has changed from a new era of "low limit" smart phones, accompanied by the landing, maturity and popularization of new technologies again and again, leading the industry into the post-smart phone era of "high and lower limits".

However, for domestic mobile phone manufacturers, it is precisely because the lower limit is too high that it is difficult to touch the ceiling of the industry at the nearest distance.

The new era of smart phones once seems to break through from any "point" to drive the rapid development of brands and industries. For example, the Nokia N95, which led a new era, integrates various functions such as music, photography, intelligence, the Internet, Bluetooth and GPS navigation; or, as the first to integrate NPU into the mobile phone CPU, making a qualitative leap in the mobile phone shooting function, thus ushering in its own "word-of-mouth" era of Huawei.

However, for the current domestic mobile phone manufacturers, at the moment when the popular products have tended to develop in an all-round way of "morality, intelligence, physical fitness and beauty", it is difficult to make breakthroughs and innovations from "points" to "surfaces", and they are more or less caught in the vortex of "homogenization", and it is difficult to "cover all aspects".

And this "homogenization" is not only reflected in the product, but also in the "dilemma" of the entire domestic mobile phone industry.

1. Insufficient brand value.

After Huawei fell into the chip dilemma, domestic mobile phone brands have moved towards "high-end", especially throughout last year, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and Honor have targeted the high-end market priced above $600 on flagship and sub-flagship models to obtain higher profit margins and more advanced brand images.

However, from the perspective of one year's "actual combat", the major brands are not optimistic about their achievements, and even some manufacturers' high-end models have "dived" too seriously in the short term, which has eroded the original "cost-effective" image and hurt the feelings of the first batch of consumers who supported them.

The reason is that the first is that the high-end machines issued by domestic mobile phone manufacturers are almost all the same pile hardware, from chips, photography modules, to screens, speakers and fuselage materials, but ignore the fluency and experience of the mobile phone itself is the real demand orientation of consumers.

Secondly, in the comparison of apple, Samsung and Huawei as high-end benchmarks, it is difficult for consumers to accept the flashy "high configuration" as the "brand premium" of the early adopter, and naturally there will be a "negative evaluation" of their brand.

2. Insufficient core R&D strength

At the moment of "rejuvenating the country with science and technology", the domestic mobile phone industry is still "stuck neck" by chips, and most of the "gimmicks" of domestic mobile phone manufacturers' flagship machines still come from their own "supply chain", and have nothing to do with their own technology.

Just as 2021, as a year of domestic mobile phone manufacturers collectively impacting the high-end market, but because the performance of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 series is not as good as expected, the fever is serious, which indirectly makes the temperature control of multiple brand flagship machines less than expected, so that domestic mobile phone manufacturers staged a "dragon taming war", which not only buried the fast road of the high-end market blanking in the post-Huawei era, but also pulled down the brand power of some brands in the minds of consumers.

"Huainanzi Lan Meditation" also has "begging for fire is not as good as flint, sending a well is not as good as sinking", Huawei is precisely because of the self-developed Kirin chip series and the success of the system fluency polishing, it is separated from the "China Cool Union", and once in the high-end market with Apple, naturally making domestic mobile phone users have higher expectations for other mobile phone manufacturers.

Huawei's past glory has also witnessed that in the global mobile phone industry, who has the most advanced and core technology and research and development capabilities, then in the future, who will be able to stand out among a number of manufacturers.

3. Offline channels are still king

In today's popularity of the Internet and online shopping, offline channels are still a point that cannot be underestimated for mobile phone manufacturers.

According to the "2020 Second Phase 5G Terminal Consumption Trend Report" released by the China Mobile Terminal Laboratory in 2021, the average replacement cycle of mobile phone users in China reached 25.3 months, which was 1 month longer than the first report in 2019.

It can be seen that for the vast majority of consumers, as a long-term, high-frequency product, whether the mobile phone can give it an intuitive feeling and a sense of trial experience before purchase is particularly important, which also highlights the advantages of offline channels. Moreover, for the vast majority of consumers, the density of offline stores represents their brand awareness, whether it is convenient to repair after-sales and so on.

Especially from the perspective of sales, according to CINNO Research's monthly mobile phone sales data, OPPO and vivo in the first 11 months of 2021 ranked first and second in the domestic smartphone market with sales of about 60.57 million units and 53.9 million units, respectively.

And the glory of the same positioning as the Internet brand with Xiaomi, after leaving Huawei, with more than 30 channel providers including existing shareholders, in the third quarter of 2021, the market share briefly surpassed Xiaomi, ranking third among domestic mobile phone manufacturers, which shows the importance of offline channels, perhaps this is why Xiaomi has developed offline stores so vigorously in the past two years.

Therefore, in the post-smart phone era, in the dilemma of the entire domestic mobile phone industry, brand power, research and development power and channel side are interlinked and complement each other, xiaomi, OPPO, vivo and glory, no matter who takes that step first and improves the whole chain, will represent a new beginning and benchmark in the domestic mobile phone industry.

"Anti-inner roll" advanced, domestic mobile phones wave away "adolescence"?

After experiencing the internal volume, setbacks and major reshuffles in the domestic mobile phone industry in 2021, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have gradually changed from the impulse to blindly follow the trend to the calm of self-seeking value. Just as teenagers wave away from adolescence, from the emphasis of "ideal principles" to the "principle of reality" to experience fluency, to complete a reconciliation between "superego" and "self".

Xiaomi is perhaps the most representative of this settlement. As a brand that has pulled down the price of smart phones, it may be Xiaomi's consistent style to play the inner volume to the extreme, and "cost performance" is naturally the deep-rooted influence of many users.

However, success is also related to this failure. When "high-end" is linked to "cost performance", Xiaomi can only "idealistically" pile up materials on the sprint high-end models, and want to pull down the price point of smart phones in the past. However, it ignores the real appeal of the high-end mobile phone users who are already full in the configuration in reality, which is the smoothness of the experience and the harmony of the ecology.

Just as the Apple mobile phone before the iPhone X was not the best screen, the Huawei mate40 series that successfully won the high-end was also criticized for the screen, but for the users of Apple and Huawei, the system ecology and self-development of the two are the original choices of users. On the contrary, when Xiaomi uses the best screen, the latest high-end chip, the top image module, and the speaker to pull user expectations to the highest point, the high-end model users who jump to Xiaomi for the first time have once again widened the psychological gap.

But Xiaomi is smart, not accepted by reality to accept reality, to turn setbacks into experience, as Emerson said: "Every setback or adverse mutation is with the same or larger seeds of benefit." ”

From the launch of the Xiaomi 11 series to the recent launch of Xiaomi 12 is enough to see the difference, when the conference after talking about Sony sensors, began to talk about their own computational photography, the first self-developed charging chip Xiaomi surging P1, Xiaomi MIUI 13 system metamorphosis, indicating that Xiaomi has got rid of the use of supply chain to define products, with the supply chain in the promotion of products, began to talk about their own technology and capabilities, from the release of Xiaomi 12X and Xiaomi CiVi, it can also be seen that Xiaomi gradually put down the "inner volume era" of stacking materials ", began to meet the user's own needs for a sense of realistic experience.

Of course, xiaomi's "reconciliation" with itself can only be regarded as a microcosm of the growth of domestic mobile phones, Huawei, which strives to survive, is so, the glory of wanting to return to the public vision is so, and the OPPO and vivo that want to wave away from the stereotypes of users are also the same, and domestic mobile phones are transforming on the road of youth growth, and each is shining.

The Golden Age of the Future: A Long Journey of "Self" Negotiations?

In the "benign" self-examination in the growth, domestic mobile phone brands want to open their own future golden age, need to complete the advancement of their own brand power, but also to consolidate their own competitiveness and the construction of the moat, which will be a long-distance tug-of-war with the "self".

With the consumer's demand for mobile phone experience and mobile phone manufacturers' self-development degree is getting higher and higher, the iteration of smart phones is not as simple as the short-term improvement of pixels in previous years, the advancement of fast charging or the replacement of a set of the best screen and photography modules, especially for domestic mobile phone manufacturers who have been crowned as "assembly plants" for many years, which requires long-term technology accumulation and R & D investment to create their own ecology, and to achieve the ultimate "characteristics" and there will be a future.

As OPPO founder and CEO Chen Yongming said: "A technology company, without the underlying core technology, there can be no future." High-end products without the underlying core technology are even more castles in the air. ”

Although, the road is long; fortunately, domestic mobile phone manufacturers are already on the road.

A month ago, OPPO released its first self-developed chip, MariSilicon X, at the Future Science and Technology Conference, handing over its initial results of spending 50 billion yuan in 3 years. Technically, as an NPU chip, MariSilicon X has powerful AI computing energy efficiency, HDR, real-time RAW computing and RGBW PRO with maximum sensing capabilities, which can undoubtedly improve OPPO's imaging system by a qualitative leap.

For OPPO, the MariSilicon X chip is only a beginning, around the technical characteristics of the chip, to adapt to different SoC platforms, different CMOS and third-party software, etc., to build their own complete application ecology, but also to continuous market launch, after continuous market feedback and modification, in order to make OPPO's self-research system towards a virtuous cycle of hematopoiesis, after all, the creation and maintenance of advanced scientific and technological forces is a long-term thing.

On the other hand, vivo, as the "blue-green brother" in the eyes of consumers, also released the original system of orauin OS, using an atomic animation engine, which enables more applications to achieve background residence, achieve multi-task seamless switching, and further upgrade the mobile phone experience. Moreover, in this era full of network security, humanized security and privacy for users have been implemented.

Of course, perhaps as an NPU chip can not compare with the complexity and difficulty of SoC, the original system of oriain OS is also different from iOS, Hongmeng OS, etc., and there is no case of scientific research that has been achieved overnight, it is a gradual process.

Whether it is Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, glory, in this process, there will be many doubts. Just like the research and development of Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin chip, the stem of K3V2 is still circulating, but the team and experience of K3V2 have also created the Kirin 9000 chip that has established Huawei's research and development capabilities.

Therefore, whether it is those in the voice of doubt or those who are praising, they are in the torrent of the times with their best posture to promote and complete a new round of change, on the way to become a great technology company.

Perhaps, in the near future, in that envisioned golden age, in addition to Huawei HiSilicon and Tsinghua Unigroup Zhanrui, more domestic manufacturers' names will appear in the mobile phone chronicle. Of course, it is not only contained in chips, but also all the highlands that domestic manufacturers have never reached the top.