Text: Xiao Yuan
On the morning of January 14, according to the latest news from data agency Counterpoint Research, The Weekly Data Report on China's Smartphones showed that Apple maintained its First Place in China's smartphone sales and revenue for 6 consecutive weeks, becoming the undisputed leader in China's high-end mobile phone market. In recent years, apple's starting price of each generation of iPhones has not risen, but declined, which has a significant impact on the overall share of the iPhone market.
As can be seen from the figure, since September last year, China's mobile phone market share has been occupied by Apple, Vivo and OPPO. As the iPhone 13 series began to be listed one after another, starting from the second week of November, Apple's mobile phone sales exceeded vivo and was far ahead, which is the best embodiment of the price reduction strategy of the iPhone 13 series.
With the sale of the iPhone 13 series, Apple's stock price has also risen, up 34.7% last year, and recently, Apple's market value in the United States once broke through the threshold of $3 trillion, which is the first time in the history of the global stock market and reflects Apple's success. Since the departure of iconic Steve Jobs, Apple's market capitalization has grown nearly 9 times.
Since the beginning of 2018, 38 years after Apple went public, its market value has exceeded trillion US dollars for the first time. Two years later, however, Apple's market capitalization surpassed $2 trillion, and it took just 16 months to reach nearly $3 trillion. It has to be said that the iPhone13 can get such a high ranking, which is related to these factors. The first point is that previous generations of iPhone products laid the foundation for it.
Second, the iPhone 13's relatively low starting price when it was released in China helped drive sales, and the photography feature and 5G feature also helped drive sales. Of course, there is also a reason for this is Apple's main competitor in the high-end market, Huawei. Due to the differential treatment of Huawei by the United States, it has fallen from the world's first to the top 5 domestic mobile phone sales. It can be said that Apple has enjoyed the dividend of suppressing Huawei.
At present, in the Chinese mobile phone market, especially in the high-end market of more than 5,000 yuan, Huawei has lost market share, almost all of which are occupied by Apple. In this case, the popularity of the iPhone 13 will naturally be much higher, and Apple is undoubtedly the biggest winner. Unless domestic mobile phone manufacturers can reach the status of Huawei mobile phones, Apple will remain ahead.
In fact, in the future, any domestic company may encounter huawei's current situation. In a way, Apple is still the most powerful mobile phone company at the moment. As a supplier of Apple's products, basically everyone makes a lot of money. At first, domestic apple suppliers were guaranteed in terms of price and quality, so Apple also used a large number of domestic suppliers and foundry factories.
Foxconn is the most typical example. Its founder, Terry Gou, has said that once Apple exits China, many companies will face bankruptcy. Although this phrase is a bit of an exaggeration, it reflects the fact that many suppliers rely heavily on Apple. If the company is abandoned by Apple, it will definitely suffer serious losses. Apple has really done this, kicking 34 Chinese suppliers out of the supply chain.
Since Apple entered the mobile phone field, it has established an extremely well-established supply chain, covering hundreds of suppliers in various countries around the world, and the mainland is no exception, but Apple has begun to intentionally transfer its productivity abroad. Pegatron announced that it will spend $150 million to build a factory in India, and Apple's three major foundries in China will gather in India.
In March 2021, Apple unilaterally announced that it would kick OFILM out of the supply chain of providing itself with touchscreen accessories, and such a sudden decision caught OFILM off guard. In the first half of 2021, OFILM's profit directly fell by 93%, and the market value directly evaporated by 30 billion. OFILM's experience is just the beginning, Apple has kicked more than 30 Chinese suppliers out of the supply chain, and many companies are directly facing the risk of bankruptcy.
The former "fruit chain" was suddenly completely abandoned, and this matter even attracted the attention of CCTV. CCTV issued a warning: We must increase the self-development of core technologies, and we must get rid of "Apple dependence" as soon as possible. Apple's "crossing the river and demolishing the bridge" behavior has brought "catastrophic" harm to domestic suppliers in the rising stage. However, Apple soon tasted the price of abandoning the "fruit chain".
In order to develop the new energy vehicle business, Apple extended an "olive branch" to BYD and Ningde Times, and asked these two Chinese companies to build factories in the United States and form a professional service team for themselves. BYD and Ningde era made the decision to make 1.4 billion Chinese raise their eyebrows at the same time, resolutely rejecting Apple's cooperation request, and giving Cook the first taste of "closed door soup".
BYD and NINGD era have absolute strength and international influence in the new energy market. BYD is the king of new energy vehicle sales, and ningde era is a big man in the new energy battery industry. In other words, even if they don't make Apple's money, they can develop well. In order to get rid of apple's influence, OFILM opened up its own new direction in the second half of the year, constantly entering new business areas, and also increasing its own research and development efforts.
Recently, OFILM has come with good news, its breakthrough in 7P optical lenses, mass production work is steadily advancing. In addition, 8P lenses have also been successfully developed and started trial production, and they are also deeply deployed in the fields of new energy automatic driving and body electronics. Its product layout spans optical lenses and cameras, and extends to products such as lidar and millimeter-wave radar.
In the process of of OFILM's transformation, domestic manufacturers such as Huawei and Xiaomi have given strong support and help, and the camera modules of many mobile phone models have adopted OFILM products, and the shooting effect and experience are no less than those of foreign brands. At present, Xiaomi has invested in more than 360 companies, including multiple fields. Xiaomi will provide technical, financial and talent support for these domestic manufacturers to help them grow into enterprises with core technologies and apply the technical achievements to Xiaomi products.
Xiaomi 12 can exceed 1.8 billion in five minutes, which also shows that the localization level of domestic high-end products and their supply chains is constantly improving. Industry experts predict that Xiaomi's achievements in promoting domestic supply chains will become a "killer weapon" for Xiaomi to compete with Samsung and Apple. And Huawei is not indifferent, following the Kirin 9000 and Kirin 9000E two 5-nanometer chips, and then launched the Kirin 9006C 5-nanometer process chip, mounted on the laptop L420 for government and enterprise users.
If you want to beat a competitor like Apple, retreating is useless. First of all, we should pay attention to the manufacturing industry; secondly, we must develop our own manufacturing industry, cultivate talents, engineers, etc., and stabilize the industrial chain. Only by maintaining the competitiveness of the supply chain and driving the strength of domestic enterprises with science and technology can we occupy an active position in the market. "Striking iron also needs to be hard", technology cannot be bought, only in their own hands is the real thing.