The news that Meizu wants to sell to Geely has been confirmed by many media and professionals, saying that the two sides are now doing due diligence, of course, it is not clear whether it will really be sold in the end.
From being comparable to Apple and the first smartphone manufacturer in China, to now falling to the point of selling, Meizu has really made many fans sigh. And when we look back at the more than 10 years of Meizu's development, we will find that the boss Huang Zhang actually made 4 serious mistakes, which finally led to the current result.
The first mistake is to reject Lei Jun, before the establishment of Xiaomi, Lei Jun admired Huang Zhang, and asked Huang Zhang, hoping to invest in Meizu, at that time to Meizu valuation of 1 billion, Lei Jun accounted for 30%, but to be the chairman, but also introduced Lin Bin to Huang Zhang, hoping that Huang Zhang can let 5% of the shares to Lin Bin.
Huang Zhang disagreed, to firmly grasp Meizu in his own hands, and finally Lei Jun took Lin Bin and others to make millet, which was a good opportunity missed by Meizu.
The second mistake was to fight with Qualcomm and stick to MediaTek. At that time, Qualcomm wanted a lot of patent fees, Meizu rejected Qualcomm, but also engaged in the "anti-Qualcomm alliance", without Qualcomm chips, choose MediaTek, in order to evade patent fees, and later also chose Samsung, that is, not to cooperate with Qualcomm.
And Qualcomm's influence on smart phones is getting bigger and bigger, MediaTek is really not as good as Qualcomm, Meizu, who does not cooperate with Qualcomm, slowly lost its competitiveness, and by 2016 the two sides reconciled, but Meizu has lost the best golden opportunity.
The third mistake is to cut off the charm blue. In 2015, Meizu launched the brand Meizu Blue, positioned in the middle and low grades, competing with Redmi and other competitions, and in 2015, Meizu's sales reached 20 million units, an increase of 400% year-on-year.
But Meizu later felt that Charm Blue did not make money, and the things that lost money could not be done, could not do low-end, and wanted to do high-end boutique machines, so Meizu stopped Charm Blue again, but Meizu actually had no ability and strength to do high-end boutique machines at that time.
Finally, high-end sales are not good, the low-end market is also lost, sales have completely fallen to the trough, and now pick up the charm blue, but the times have changed.
The fourth mistake is that after introducing Ali's investment, he took Ma Yun's money, but did not help Ali to work, and finally had a very unpleasant quarrel with Ali, resulting in Ali's withdrawal.
In 2015, Huang Zhang went to Hangzhou to meet Ma Yun, and later Meizu received a $590 million investment from Alibaba, which was valued at about 10 billion yuan at that time.
The reason why Ali invested in Meizu was that Ali engaged in its own YunOS, hoping that Meizu could enrich its own ecosystem, and required Meizu's mobile phone to be equipped with the YunOS system promoted by Ali at that time.
But later Meizu only adopted Ali's system on a few low-end charm blue models, and other main models are still promoting their own Android-based Flyme OS, and Meizu mobile phones are still launched in JD.com, not Tmall.
This made Ali very angry, so in 2017, Ali withdrew his investment and no longer cooperated with Meizu, and Meizu also lost an opportunity to hold Ali's thigh and take off.
Of course, the above 4 errors are very obvious, and in addition to these 4 errors, there are many management and product problems, which will not be analyzed here.
It can be said that Meizu got up early in the mobile phone industry, but finally caught up with a late set, and it could not be saved by itself, which is indeed regrettable, if this time can sell a good price, it is also the best ending.