Text | Science and technology new knowledge, author 丨 Yu Matsuba, editor 丨 moon see
On the evening of January 17, Ni Fei, senior vice president of ZTE and president of ZTE Terminal Division, posted a sports coat printed with the word "China" on Weibo. Subsequently, ZTE's official Weibo forwarded and appended the text "Looking for the owner of the clothes". Netizens keenly found that this coat was the same coat in Wu Jing's popular emoji. On the same day, at the media communication meeting held by ZTE Terminal, Ni Fei announced that Wu Jing had become the spokesperson of ZTE mobile phones. Later, a number of entertainment bloggers and technology bloggers posted #Wu Jing Endorsement ZTE Mobile Phone# topic blog posts and sent the topic to Weibo's current affairs hotspot.
In the comment area of the topic Weibo, many netizens said that ZTE was a mobile phone used by their parents and elders many years ago, and later disappeared, resulting in their belief that the mobile phone brand had long since collapsed. It can be seen that the new generation of consumers' impression of ZTE has been very vague.
Although ZTE mobile phones have not disappeared, they have indeed been separated from the mainstream mobile phone market in China for many years. China's smartphone giant has long since changed from the original "China Cool Link" to "Huami OV". After ZTE officially announced Wu Jing as the brand spokesperson on January 20, the brand heat soared, but this sudden heat did not bring much real transformation to ZTE.
Although it is on the "top stream" of Wu Jing, but the iron still needs to be hard, whether it is entering the high-end market, or trying to return to the mainstream mobile phone brand, it needs ZTE to come up with a complete change.
It has also become popular
ZTE mobile phones were once popular in the domestic market, but they go back more than a decade.
2010 was a key year for the popularity of smartphones in China. This year, domestic mobile phone manufacturers began to have the ability to export stable quality smart phones on a large scale after several years of technology accumulation. By 2012, the price of domestic smart phones also fell further, and through cooperation with operators such as mobile and Unicom, many domestic smart phones sank to a broader market.
2012 is the year when domestic smart phones bloom. At that time, OPPO and vivo were still circling around female users, the audience was relatively limited, and the technology was lackluster; Xiaomi mobile phones were just emerging through hunger marketing, and they were more favored by mobile phone enthusiasts. ZTE, along with Huawei, Coolpad and Lenovo, is called "China Cool Union", becoming the "light of domestic mobile phones" in the mouths of the media and consumers.
However, ZTE mobile phones showed a downward trend in the domestic mobile phone market in 2015. This year, the actual shipment volume of ZTE mobile phones in the domestic market was 56 million units, and the shipment target was not completed, and the problem was that the sales volume in the Chinese market was far less than expected. In 2014, Xiaomi OV has sought to transform and upgrade, expanding online and offline channels while impacting the high-end market to adapt to the new market demand. However, ZTE is trapped in low-end positioning due to excessive dependence on carrier channels and neglect of the high-end mobile phone market.
In the face of the decline of the brand, ZTE failed to fight back, relying on overseas market share to support it, and finally lost the domestic mobile phone market and fell out of the list of domestic mainstream mobile phone brands. Later domestic mobile phone market pattern is well known, starting in 2015, the domestic mobile phone market pattern from "China Cool Union" gradually changed into "Huami OV", Xiaomi broke through, OV also played a technical turnaround battle, Huawei is in the pattern change is called "flowing domestic mobile phone, iron Huawei".
When it comes to the decline of ZTE in the domestic market, people always have an element of regret, because from the starting point and business scope, ZTE and Huawei are very similar. At the starting point, ZTE and Huawei were both established in Shenzhen in the 1980s, starting through digital switches and other services, and gradually developed into well-known communication equipment manufacturers in China.
In terms of business scope, ZTE mainly has three major services: carrier network business, consumer business, and government and enterprise business, which overlap with Huawei's main business. However, in recent years, ZTE's three major businesses have always been in a state of being comprehensively crushed by Huawei.
Taking the first half of 2021 as an example, ZTE's operating income was 53.07 billion yuan, and the net profit margin was about 7.7%. Among them, the network revenue of operators was 35.05 billion yuan, the revenue of government and enterprise services was 5.67 billion yuan, and the income of consumer business was 12.35 billion yuan. During the same period, Huawei's revenue was RMB320.4 billion and its net profit margin was 9.8%. Among them, the revenue of operator business was 136.9 billion yuan, the revenue of enterprise business was 42.9 billion yuan, and the revenue of consumer business was 135.7 billion yuan.
It can be seen that in the first half of 2021, huawei's operator business and consumer business revenue was basically flat, in 2019 and 2020, Huawei's consumer business revenue exceeded the operator business, accounting for 54% of the total revenue of the year.
In contrast, ZTE's consumer business revenue in the first half of 2021 is far inferior to that of the operator business, and it is only 23% of the total revenue. It can be seen that ZTE's consumer business has fallen into a long-term downturn. ZTE's second rise must be driven by the consumer business, which is mainly based on the mobile phone business. However, with the passage of time, it is not easy for ZTE to return to the domestic mainstream mobile phone market again.
What to take to impact the high-end mobile phone market?
In 2015, when the fate turned, ZTE struggled. At that time, ZTE released the first high-end mobile phone AXON sky machine, the domestic price of 2699 yuan. However, this high-end product has not helped ZTE open the high-end market and complete the brand transformation. In terms of appearance, this product is complained that the design is complicated and ugly; in terms of performance, it is not as good as the Redmi new machine emperor Note 2 of the period.
What is more fatal is that at this time, the shortcomings of ZTE's offline channels began to appear. Some consumers even complained on the Internet that even if they wanted to buy AXON machine, they couldn't buy it.
Some mobile phone enthusiasts told "Science and Technology New Knowledge", "Around 2015, the figure of ZTE mobile phones was almost invisible in physical stores. ZTE has long been addicted to contract machines and campus machines, relying on operator stores to ship, not developing its own physical stores at all, and only cooperating with Di Xintong. Moreover, ZTE mobile phone repair rate is high, the price and profit are also low, and mobile phone store owners are increasingly reluctant to buy goods. ”
In this way, ZTE can only hope for online channels, but the problem is that the sinking of e-commerce in 2015 is still not enough, and the main users of e-commerce are still focused on urban user groups. However, due to the lack of recognition of ZTE mobile phones by urban consumers, ZTE's brand marketing is also relatively weak.
In 2017, ZTE carried out a curve impact on the road of high-end and launched the Lamborghini customized mobile phone TL99. The design of this mobile phone is heavy industry, only catering to the aesthetics of middle-aged men, and the price is converted into about 16,000 yuan. There are too few target consumers, but the price is extremely high, and it is expected that after the launch of this product, it will sink into the sea.
As early as 2016, Huawei launched the Mate 9 Porsche customized version of the mobile phone, priced at 8999 yuan, surpassing the price of the iPhone 7 series mobile phone launched by Apple that year. But Huawei launched the Porsche Customized Version of the Mate 9 at the same time, but also launched the regular version of the Mate 9 and Mate 9 Pro, priced between 3399-5399 to cater to the mass market. In contrast, ZTE, only launching a single style of high-end customized mobile phones, not only can not open the mass market, but also can not help ZTE to complete the high-end transformation of the brand.
While the high-end product strategy continues to fail, ZTE's marketing actions are also lackluster. In 2014, the rise of traffic star forces, OPPO and vivo set their sights on the fan economy, asked a large number of traffic stars to endorse, and the products are also constantly improving, sitting firmly in the front row of domestic high-end mobile phones.
Xiaomi and Huawei, which have always been safe, have also begun to play the idea of fan economy, and in 2019, Xiaomi and Huawei have invited Wang Yuan and Yi Qianxi as spokespersons to officially bow to the fan economy.
The fan group is an irrational consumer group, and the consumption ability is strong, which can bring effective transformation to the brand and promote the transformation of the brand to high-end. ZTE, until 2021, finally hooked up with traffic stars. In February 2021, ZTE mobile phone officially announced Liu Haocun as the brand spokesperson. However, in view of the fact that Liu Haocun itself is not the top stream, and the controversy news throughout 2021 is frequent, ZTE, which first tested the water flow economy, did not get the desired product publicity effect. After a year, ZTE mobile phone finally invited a relatively stable and reliable "top stream" - Wu Jing.
ZTE chose Wu Jing as a brand spokesperson, which has certain cleverness. Because Wu Jing is not only the box office guarantee of the film circle in recent years, but also the "top stream" that rarely eats all circles in the entertainment industry, "the out-of-hand photo that does not change for ten thousand years" and "the green sportswear emoji" are all national hot terriers. Therefore, after the endorsement news came out, entertainment bloggers also ridiculed whether Wu Jing would take new endorsement photos after endorsing ZTE mobile phones, and more netizens contributed new stems to change the word "China" in the sportswear emoji to "ZTE".
With the huge traffic of Wu Jing, ZTE mobile phone related topics are not only involved in technology bloggers, but also many entertainment bloggers closely follow this hot spot, which also vaguely shows ZTE's current traffic and entertainment marketing strategy. This marketing strategy aims to promote brand breaking the circle and reflectSZ's determination to return to the mainstream mobile phone market.
The fan base of tech bloggers is mainly digital product enthusiasts, mobile phone enthusiasts, and most of them are men. The fan base of entertainment bloggers is mainly star-chasers, and most of them are women. The news that Wu Jing will endorse ZTE's mobile phone warms up through the entertainment account and successfully attracts the attention of female consumers. In view of the fact that Wu Jing itself also has many male fans, after the ZTE official announced Wu Jing as a spokesperson, the male group also paid attention to ZTE.
Wu Jing's box office appeal is unquestionable, but entering the mobile phone field, how much market appeal does Wu Jing have? The kryptonite ability of the fans of traffic stars is amazing because there are organizations such as the Fan Support Association, which will purchase idol endorsement products as a task within the meeting. Although Wu Jing has a large traffic and is a frequent customer of hot search, he is still not a traffic star, so ZTE asked Wu Jing to be a spokesperson, and the dividends of the fan economy may be difficult to eat.
The Weibo topic #Wujing Endorsement ZTE Mobile Phone has exceeded 200 million in less than two days, but ZTE Mobile officially announced that Wu Jing has become a weibo spokesperson for the brand, and the number of likes and comments is currently not more than 10,000. And Wu Jing himself did not forward or publish the relevant Weibo of ZTE. Among Wu Jing's fans, there are only 3 microblogs about ZTE mobile phones.
There are many more lessons to make up
In December 2021, Ni Fei, vice president of ZTE and president of ZTE Terminal Division, once again expressed his determination to the mobile phone business and the importance of the ecological goal of smart terminals in an interview, and said that the goal of developing the consumer business is unswerving.
But ZTE still needs to make up too many lessons, Tmall's official flagship store, only belong to the Axon 30, S30 and Yuanhang 20 these three series of 8 mobile phones. In terms of high-end models, the current industry's judgment standards for high-end machines are different, if the minimum standard (priced at more than 3,000 yuan) to calculate, ZTE currently has only two high-end models, namely Axon 30 Ultra and Axon 30 Ultra Aerospace Edition, the price of the former different memory versions is about 4000-4600 yuan, the latter price is close to 7000 yuan.
The Axon 30 Ultra Aerospace Edition is on the left and the Axon 30 Ultra on the right
The Axon 30 Ultra has been pinned on ZTE to impact the mid-to-high-end market, and has become a competitor with Huawei Mate 40, OPPO Find X3 Pro and Xiaomi Mi 11 Pro, and is often compared by review bloggers. Among them, the various configurations of Xiaomi 11 Pro are closest to the Axon 30 Ultra, and the CPU models are SM8350 (Snapdragon 888), and the price is basically flat.
In this way, in terms of cost performance, ZTE and Xiaomi are almost at the same level, but there is a gap of more than 40 times in monthly sales and evaluations. At present, in the official flagship store of Xiaomi Tmall, the monthly sales of Xiaomi 11 Pro are more than 4,000, and the number of reviews is more than 20,000. The ZTE Axon 30 Ultra has only 90 monthly sales and more than 500 reviews.
More importantly, in the official flagship store of Xiaomi Tmall, the highest-end mobile phone with the highest sales currently is the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro. Compared with Xiaomi 11 Pro and ZTE Axon 30 Ultra, Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro is equipped with a relatively better performance Snapdragon 8 Gen1 processor, although the price of the same memory version is about 1,000 yuan higher than the previous two, but it is more popular with the market, with monthly sales of more than 10,000.
ZTE Axon 30 Ultra and Xiaomi Mi 11 Pro, Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro sales comparison
Through the comparison with Xiaomi, it can be seen that the current high-end flagship machine Axon series of ZTE is too slow to iterate, fail to keep up with market demand, and lack the foundation to become a hit.
The small number of ZTE mobile phone product lines and the slow iteration of flagship machines are undoubtedly the embodiment of backward research and development capabilities. From 2018 to 2020, Huawei's R&D investment was 101.5 billion, 131.7 billion and 141.8 billion yuan, respectively, and ZTE's R&D investment was 10.96 billion, 12.548 billion and 14.797 billion yuan, respectively. It can be seen that the R & D investment of the two has always had a gap of about 10 times. In terms of the number of patents, ZTE also lags behind Huawei, and enterprise investigation data shows that from 2015 to September 2020, huawei's number of invention patents was 19,800, and ZTE's was 0.9 million.
ZTE is increasing its R&D investment year after year, with R&D investment accounting for 12.8%, 13.8% and 14.6% of total revenue from 2018 to 2020, respectively. However, from the first echelon of returning to domestic mobile phone brands, it is still a long way to go.
Wu Jing can only remind people of ZTE mobile phones, and the only thing that can make people decide to buy ZTE mobile phones can be ZTE itself.