Written by: Wu Xianzhi
Editor: Wang Pan
Source: Photon Planet (ID: TMTweb)
In the past month, OPPO, Huawei, Xiaomi, and Honor have released new folding screen mobile phones. So far, in addition to the blue factory, the mainstream domestic mobile phone manufacturers have been "folded".
In the context of domestic mobile phone brands impacting high-end, the market value of folding screens may not be as good as the strategic value.
Taking Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, and OPPO as an example, the starting price of the four folding screen new products is located at more than 7,000 yuan, and even the earlier Huawei Mate X2 once raised the starting price to 17999 yuan.
At least until the advent of Apple's folding screen mobile phone in 2023, big factories have two years of window to test the ceiling. It should be pointed out that the rush of factories to fold the screen is under the premise that the supply chain has not yet produced a scale effect, and the short-term cost is still high.
According to market research firm Counterpoint Research data, since playing the "cost-effective" card, iPhone 13 series sales have driven Apple back to a strong point, has won the Chinese market sales champion for two consecutive months, and even reached 23.6% market share in November.
At the other end, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have almost opened up in order to cope with Apple's dimensionality reduction. Before Yu Chengdong took the P50 Pocket, talked about the experience of makeup and beauty, and then Zhao Ming dropped the mobile phone after three years, the last time the industry had such a lively thing was a few years ago.
Fold the screen with the scene
High-end brings user stickiness and improves gross profit margins, which is impossible without the support of the supply chain behind it.
Photon Planet noted that on the one hand, mobile phone manufacturers achieve dimensional upgrading through folding screens, and at the same time adjust the existing supply system through technical iteration. Among them, in addition to the relatively single suppliers of Xiaomi MIX FOLD and Huawei' two folding screens, Honor and OPPO have adopted a hybrid supplier strategy, which has more room for maneuver.
"Xiaomi and Huawei have different logic in the supply chain, Xiaomi has been supporting Huaxing Optoelectronics over the years, and the right to speak is also higher." For reasons that are well known, Huawei's two mobile phones come from two different suppliers. An industry insider told Photon Planet that due to the limited core components, Huawei cannot undertake upstream production capacity on a large scale, and has to seek a small and refined, expensive and good path.
This indirectly shows that Visionox has changed from a Xiaomi supplier to a Huawei supplier, which may be something else that is difficult to say.
Visionox has jointly developed the curved screen of CC9 Pro and the surround screen of Xiaomi MIX Alpha with Xiaomi, but the above two products are not walking, more like Xiaomi's behavior of asking for directions. After becoming a core supplier of Hua in early 2021, an obvious fact is that Visionox's flexible screen volume cannot go up, and the production cost cannot be reduced.
"If there is no advantage in quantity, it can only make concessions on the purchase price, and some parts may not have the same bargaining power as other manufacturers, so it can only do high-end." The above direction makes Huawei the only brand among all domestic mobile phone brands that can repeatedly jump around and down without wrestling for 10,000 yuan, and it is also the only brand that has completed high-end transformation so far.
High pricing, coupled with other non-market factors, Huawei's mobile phones above 5,000 yuan often need to be increased. For example, P50 Pro, P50 Pocket two models, the current spot in the channel business need to add 600-800 prices.
The same is the folding screen, the models released in the first half of 2021 are completely different from the models released in the second half of the year. More typical is that Huawei Mate X2 suffered a bad review, and in the second-hand market, it was either priced down (allegedly below 10,000 yuan) or had no market.
The above-mentioned people believe that the reason why the Mate X2 is not selling well has two factors, on the one hand, the pricing is high, the market acceptance capacity is limited, "I have a budget of more than ten thousand yuan, and I will definitely weigh it with the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, not to mention the thousands of expensive." On the other hand, the screen crease problem is serious after the folding screen mobile phone is sold for half a year, and the after-sales service is more frequent.
AMOLED requires that each layer of substrate, cathode layer, organic molecular layer, anode layer, etc. be foldable, which is quite demanding for the process. The Mate X2 and other domestic folding screen players entered the market in the same period and received a flat response, largely due to the instability of the domestic supply chain process.
In contrast, because the P50 Pocket is priced at 9,000 yuan, the appearance is exquisite, the market positioning is accurate, and the acceptance and tolerance are higher. A second-hand mobile phone dealer told Photon Planet that after the release on December 23 last year, he knew that he had sold 4 units by the beginning of January, and the Mate X2 sold this number throughout the year.
If the obstacle to the high-end of domestic brands is Apple, then the passing line of the folding screen market is Samsung.
Photon Planet learned from several channel providers in different regions, in the whole year of 2021, Samsung is the mainstream of the folding screen market, while Huawei and Xiaomi are difficult to say successful. OPPO's folding screen has just entered the market, and the current situation is not clear.
It is worth noting that the left and right horizontal folding and the upper and lower folding seem to be similar, but there are completely different audiences, even if many folding screen mobile phones are mainly business.
Photon Planet learned that folding screen mobile phones are more active in the second-hand market, and many merchants reflect that the source of goods mainly comes from gifts, and there is not much self-use.
In addition, women may be a consumer group that cannot be ignored.
They have a special love for up and down folding, such as the just-listed Huawei P50 Pocket and Samsung "Rouge Box" (Z Flip), which have good market feedback. According to three merchants in different regions, compared with the main business of the horizontal folding machine, the folding machine looks like a makeup box, and the positioning is clear, which may be the main reason for the slightly better sales at present.
In hindsight, the most successful product of Huawei's winter new product launch is actually the P50 Pocket. Here we must praise Yu Chengdong once, in front of the public to apply grease and powder to accurately find the potential user needs, which is more effective than piling up "high-end" on AITO.
Big mouth, no loss.
A key year for domestic high-end
At present, the mismatch between supply and demand of folding screens is more obvious. Manufacturers believe that users have a strong demand for large screens, and some urban white-collar workers will also pay for nearly 10,000 new things, which may not be the case.
A number of merchants told Photon Planet that there is a high degree of overlap between users who purchase folding screens and users of Huawei's Porsche joint models. "Maybe the folding screen evokes the memories of holding big brothers when they were young, and there is also the willingness to spend millions of dollars for a mobile phone, and what people want is a fancy."
This may mean that the market of folding screens presents strong subdivision attributes, uncles and aunts favor left and right horizontal folding, and famous ladies like to fold up and down.
Frankly speaking, Huawei's mobile phone "luxury" route has indeed achieved high-end, but unfortunately it is difficult to become mainstream due to small sales. At present, the folding screens of Honor, Xiaomi, and OPPO have different styles, but it is difficult to quickly open the market.
Xiaomi MIX FOLD was positioned as "efficient office" earlier, and there is nothing wrong with logic, but it seems to be somewhat "overkill" with the iPad mini (plug-in version). Xiaomi MIX FOLD differentiated route, even if it claims that the hinge can be used at least 200,000 times is not bad, but unfortunately the market is skeptical about the folding screen, and the effect is flat.
From the perspective of the large screen alone, the iPad is more cost-effective than the iPad mini and the folding screen. However, the Xiaomi Tablet 5 is more comparable to the iPad, and the former is also a single product that Xiaomi has received a good reputation in recent years.
"The price of mobile phones has obvious characteristics, the audience below 4000 is the widest, and the glory of the past year has relied on the success of this price to open the market; above 6000, many users will weigh the products with Apple in the same period." Last year, it happened to be 13 times without price increases, and even grabbed a large part of the market of 4000-6000 yuan. ”
The impact of Apple's 13 series on domestic brands is very large. "Fire to Apple packaging boxes are selling particularly well", some mobile phone recycling merchants told Photon Planet that some second-hand merchants will specifically look for him to buy mobile phone packaging boxes, due to the hot market, the price of the box has also been raised.
Back in 2020, Huawei P40 grabbed from online to offline, even if the price increase is not worried about sales. A year later, the P40 4G version and the dimensionality-reduced version of the P40 4GE did not stir up much splash. And the nearby market of 4,000 yuan was also rubbed on the ground by glory. "Glory rushed very hard last year, and even competed with the price-reduced fruit 11."
Some voices believe that the reason why Glory can rise rapidly is largely based on product quality, but at the same time, many people are also worried about whether Glory can continue its good reputation.
At the other end, the OPPO Find N of the green factory earlier attracted the attention of the market because of the groundbreaking price of less than 8,000 yuan, and the current market response is still not optimistic. An OPPO brand owner privately told Photon Planet that the cost performance comes from suppressing other components, but the positioning is not a female group - they are not as sensitive to performance requirements as men, but more concerned about appearance and targeted functions.
OPPO Find N also caused a lot of turmoil because of the Huawei P50 Pocket released later. Yu Chengdong's cold words at that time made the outside world begin to have a strong interest in "hinges".
"If you see any company's folding screen closed without gaps, it must have used Huawei's patent, because the water drop hinge is Huawei's exclusive patent." The hinge is only one of the many high-tech requirements of the folding screen, and the inner coil is not necessary.
Judging from the public disclosure of each company, Huawei P50 Pocket, OPPO Find N, Xiaomi MIX FOLD, hinge service life is mostly around 200,000 times, who is the initiator of the water drop hinge is not so important, anyway, it is used in the end sooner or later to play pleats.
Unlike OPPO taking the popularity route and Xiaomi's "efficient office" route, the new machine Magic V just released by Honor is mainly "practical". Zhao Ming's two crashes were clearly intentional – the market was worried about not being durable. The design of the curved screen is also hoping to replicate the success of the previous model - in the offline market, the honor of the curved screen has hardly encountered any opponents that can be played.
The real challenge is not practical, but by the pricing of domestic machines for ten thousand yuan. At this point, Rongmi OV cannot do his best in one battle.
After the release of the Magic V conference, Zhao Ming's words more or less showed the attitude of the big manufacturers to the folding screen. He hopes that the folding screen will gradually establish market awareness for the main machine, and mentioned that it is impossible to expect Magic V to generate profits in the short term, but it is a joint point for impacting the high-end, "after this hurdle, you will feel very relaxed when you do other things."
end
After a year of fighting, Rongmi OV has not yet gained a foothold in the high-end market.
"Below 4,000 product strength, more than 6,000 more brand power, tens of thousands is a challenge to purchasing power", a brand dealer believes that the value of folding screen lies in redefining traditional mobile phones. "Many manufacturers put attention on the big screen, without noticing that in the actual use scenario, the internal and external screens have a completely different experience."
Although the screen folding is only a small action, the user still carries the habit of using the straight board, so it is necessary to make up for the missing functions of the straight board lock screen interface on the outer screen, such as the message pop-up window, two-dimensional code, face recognition and other functions external. To be precise, the folding screen is to burn the screen to the outer screen.
The above-mentioned people believe that the folding screen is only a transitional form, and a mobile phone brand has also revealed similar views to the photon planet.
Technically, the flexible screen has four stages, from a fixed curvature flexible screen to a bendable display, and then to today's folding screen, the next stage will be a fully flexible display that can be arbitrarily folded and pulled up. Due to the different forms, the positioning of mobile phones will also undergo a huge change, and the current large factories are coming in, obviously hoping to borrow the potential replacement demand and complete the high-end brand.
One person buys, three people covet, ten people watch, maybe few people will pay money to buy, but it will definitely give people a feeling of "this brand is great".
However, the problem is that domestic mobile phone manufacturers borrow folding screens to go to the high end or can not avoid Samsung and Apple. In the field of folding screens, domestic display manufacturers have not distanced themselves from Samsung's screen technology; in the price field, once any mobile phone touches 6,000 yuan, it needs to face consumers as follows: Spend the same money, buy Apple or buy domestic machines.
In short, this "fruitless" dispute is only two years, when the Apple folding is coming out, which may be the time to truly test the color of domestic brands.