How to turn over the glory of eating Huawei's old book?

Written by | Tommy

Edit | Yang Bocheng

Caption | IC Photo

At 10:08 a.m. on January 18, Honor's first folding screen mobile phone, Honor Magic V, ushered in its first sale. To everyone's surprise, the Honor Magic V sold out almost in a second, and the last folding screen phone that was swept away as soon as it went on sale was the Huawei Mate X2 released a year ago.

Online channels are "hard to find", and offline channels are even more crazy. A stall owner of Cyber City told DoNews (ID: ilovedonews) that the current sales of Honor Magic V are very hot, the original price of the 12GB +256GB version was 9999 yuan, but now it needs to increase the price by 5000 yuan, and it may not be able to get the spot immediately. ”

Because consumers are difficult to grab the Honor Magic V in online channels, and they are not willing to increase the price by 50% to buy through offline channels, it has spawned the Honor Magic V generation shooting business. The auction business is actually to help consumers snap up, and consumers need to pay about 100 yuan for the auction after the success of the snap.

A consumer who did not grab the Honor Magic V was not surprised by this, and told DoNews that the internal and external screens of the Honor Magic V can be independent, with new processors, large batteries, battery life, strong screen drop resistance, and the use of self-developed water drop hinges that can support 200,000 openings and closings, "almost every point is just in line with the appetite of consumers."

Under the comments on the sales page of Glory Jingdong's self-operated flagship store Glory Magic V, a consumer who purchased OPPO Find N and Honor Magic V at the same time said: In contrast, the entertainment of the inner and outer screens is much stronger than oppo Find N, and the inner screen is larger, more suitable for watching videos and playing games.

Honor CEO Zhao Ming is also full of confidence in honor Magic V. On December 1, 2021, Zhao Ming said after the Honor 60 series conference, "For the honor folding screen mobile phone, a lot of information is inconvenient to disclose today, but it is certain that the honor folding screen mobile phone will surpass all the folding screen mobile phones on the market now." ”

Following the Honor Magic3 series, honor Magic V has become another "fist product" that impacts the high-end market, and Honor seems to have completed its layout in the high-end market through the Magic series, but is this really the case? With Huawei's halo on its head but lacking the glory of a high-end user base, how to win the pass of the high-end market?

Back on track from a difficult situation,

But Glory did not recover Huawei's lost ground

It has been more than a year since Glory was forced to become independent.

On November 25, 2020, at the farewell meeting of Honor, Ren Zhengfei, director and CEO of Huawei, expressed the hope that Honor will fully embrace the resources of the globalized industry, establish relationships with suppliers as soon as possible, surpass Huawei, and overthrow Huawei. "Once 'divorced', don't break the thread again. In the future, we are competitors, you can hold 'foreign guns' and 'foreign cannons', we can hold the new 'Hanyang made', the new 'big knife', 'spear', who wins and who loses is not certain. ”

As a sub-brand of Huawei, Honor has been saddled with the mission of standing in the low-end market since its birth. Under the aura of Huawei, Glory only needs to guard the online channel and fill the "cost performance".

In fact, glory was once indispensable to Huawei. In the third quarter of 2020, the sales volume contributed by Honor accounted for about a quarter of Huawei's global sales and about one-third of china's sales. As Huawei is in danger, Glory is also involved. Subsequently, more than 30 Glory agents and distributors stepped forward and jointly launched a self-help acquisition operation to try to help Glory break free from the dilemma of chip supply.

When Honor first divested from Huawei, its market share fell to 3%. In August 2021, when the Honor Magic3 series was released, Honor said its market share had climbed to 14.6%, and by the end of September, this indicator had risen again to 16.2%.

The flip side of the market share back on track is that Glory's development space has also become broader. Honor abandoned the past brand positioning and mission, as an independent new individual, although Honor still continues the "1+8+N" strategy, its mission has become to impact the high-end market and recover Huawei's lost ground.

The Honor Magic3 series is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888Plus processor, and Zhao Ming has high expectations for the Honor Magic3, calling it "the industry's top flagship product, reaching and surpassing the level of Huawei's Mate and P series."

The vision is full, but the reality is bone-chilling. For glory fans, the starting price of 4599 yuan far exceeds psychological expectations, compared with the previous price of about 2000-3000 yuan, it is difficult to accept for a while. For Huawei fans, although the Honor Magic3 series is similar to the Huawei Mate50 series, the former is not a high-end model that can be accepted in a short period of time.

A mobile phone dealer clearly felt that Honor's performance in the high-end market was unsatisfactory, and there has not been much progress, "compared to the Honor Magic 3 series, most consumers are still more inclined to buy low-end models with a price of 2,000 yuan." In addition to Huawei, the price range of the Honor Magic3 series is easy to sell, and the rest of the domestic mobile phone brands are not easy to sell. ”

The lack of strength of the Honor Magic3 series in the high-end market is finally reflected in its sales. As of the DoNews release, in the official flagship store of Honor Tmall, the monthly sales of Honor Magic3 are 1000+, the monthly sales of Honor Magic3 Pro are also 1000+, and the monthly sales of Honor Magic3 to The Best Edition are only 600+. It is also worth noting that the price reduction of the three models is 500 yuan, 700 yuan and 1000 yuan respectively.

Two days before the release of the Honor Magic3 series, Xiaomi released the Xiaomi Mix4, a high-end model that is also equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888Plus processor and a starting price of 4999 yuan. Horizontal comparison, in the xiaomi tmall official flagship store, the monthly sales of the xiaomi mix4 is 3000+; vertical comparison, the low-end model Honor X30 series released in December 2021 still firmly occupies the top of the sales list, of which the monthly sales of the honor X30 is 40,000+, while the monthly sales of another low-end model honor 60 are 20,000+.

The high-end market has been short-lived,

Glory is still hard to tear off the "low-end" label

The high-end market is ushering in more fierce competition, although glory is accelerating to catch up, but it is not easy to break through against the trend.

In October 2020, market research agency IDC released the market share data of smartphones in China's price segment of more than US$600 (about 4,000 yuan) in the first half of 2020, With Huawei ranking first with a market share of 44.1%, followed by Apple with a market share of 44%, and the two occupied a total of 88.1% of the high-end market.

In other words, when consumers buy high-end mobile phones, they either choose Huawei or apple. But with Huawei being suppressed so far, Apple has almost no opponents in the domestic high-end market.

One thing that can be corroborated is that during the "Double 11" period in 2021, the top three of JD.com's self-operated mobile phone sales list were all occupied by Apple, of which the iPhone 13 ranked first with sales of 1.7128 million units, and the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 Pro Max ranked second and third with sales of 1.1461 million units and 850,400 units, respectively. In the top ten, except for the Xiaomi Mi 10S and Xiaomi Mi 11 Pro, the rest are redmi's low-end models, while honor is the only one on the list, ranking twelfth with sales of 157,800 units.

In December 2021, the monthly domestic mobile phone sales monitoring data released by marketing agency CINNO Research showed that Apple's sales of the new iPhone 13 series in 2021 were still at a high level, of which the iPhone 13 ranked first in the domestic market for two consecutive months with sales of about 2.72 million units.

In the view of the above mobile phone dealers, on the one hand, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have not really occupied a dominant position in the high-end market, especially 5,000 yuan is almost a forbidden area for all domestic mobile phone manufacturers; on the other hand, the gap between domestic mobile phone manufacturers and Apple in terms of user experience and product ecology is still very obvious.

A fact that cannot be ignored is that under the pressure of Apple dominating most of the high-end market, Honor does not have much room to play in the high-end market.

However, there has been a breakthrough in the high-end market, which is listed as an important target by Glory.

How should Honor hit the high-end market? Zhao Ming believes that the road huawei has traveled provides a good reference for everyone, and the construction of high-end brands, there is no shortcut, there is no fluke, that is, to return to the bottom of innovation in a down-to-earth manner, and constantly break through technology and consumer experience.

However, the high-end road of glory is destined to be difficult and bumpy.

Before that, whether it was brand positioning or marketing strategy, Honor had never tried to enter the high-end market, and it had never accumulated high-end user groups. More critically, Honor was forced to spin off from Huawei's system, and naturally could no longer enjoy the brand premium brought by Huawei.

Glory's dilemma doesn't stop there. Some people believe that the Kirin chip is an important cornerstone for Huawei to stand in the high-end market. Previously, Honor's use of self-developed Kirin chips shared with Huawei has opened up a big gap with a number of opponents in the low-end market, but now, Honor can only choose the same Qualcomm Snapdragon chip as Mi OV, which means that Honor needs to make up for the distance difference between It and Mi OV and find differentiation before impacting the high-end market.

It is not difficult to see that how to face the mature and inward-looking market environment, deal with competitors that should not be underestimated, and temper its own underlying innovation ability and tear off the inherent label of "low-end" will be the stumbling blocks that Glory has to remove in the process of entering the high-end market.

Folding screen mobile phone outbreak,

Can you help Honor achieve a turnaround?

It is not an easy task for a mobile phone brand to move from the low-end market to the high-end market, and the outbreak of folding screen mobile phones has provided a shortcut for this.

Before 2021, the shipment of folding screen mobile phones is a completely different picture. The same survey report from the DSCC shows that in 2019, the shipment of folding screen mobile phones was only more than 500,000 units, and in 2020, this number will only rise to 3 million.

But now the situation is improving. According to a survey report from the panel supply chain research and research agency DSCC, in the third quarter of 2021, the shipment of folding screen mobile phones reached 2.6 million units, an increase of 215% month-on-month and an increase of 480% year-on-year. It is expected that by 2022, the shipment volume of the folding screen mobile phone market will reach 17.5 million units.

At the same time, folding screen mobile phones also provide a rare opportunity to "surpass" Apple.

"It can be said that folding screen mobile phones are an important symbol of establishing the high-end brand, especially in the current high-end market with fierce competition, folding screen mobile phones are regarded as the key competitiveness of whether they can stand in the high-end market." A smartphone industry insider said.

"Judging from the current sales of Honor Magic V, Honor may hope to achieve a reversal and catch up with competitors such as Xiaomi and OPPO in the local area." The above-mentioned mobile phone dealer analysis, "but it seems that there is still a certain degree of difficulty in overtaking Apple with the folding screen mobile phone corner." At present, the average price of folding screen mobile phones released by major mobile phone manufacturers is about 13500 yuan, and according to the data of Ai Media Consulting Research Institute, the average price of global smart phones is only 2061 yuan.

In the high-end market, the competition is fierce enough that It is simply too difficult for Honor to share the cake in the mouths of Apple, Xiaomi and OV. The above-mentioned industry insiders said, "But the difficulty does not mean that there is no hope at all, after all, in the mobile phone industry, no mobile phone manufacturer can always remain the first."