Not long ago, Xiaomi announced that it will invest $10 billion in car manufacturing in the next 10 years; Huawei is also "building cars" in disguise under the banner of "not building cars". In addition, including the "blue-green" manufacturers and Apple, also said that they will enter the auto market in the future, and for a time mobile phone manufacturers raised the banner of car manufacturing almost at the same time. In the face of a menacing new opponent, there have been new actions on the side of car manufacturers recently, and the news that Geely Automobile is about to acquire Meizu mobile phones has been exposed on the Internet, which has triggered many people to speculate. So if it is true, what is the purpose of geely automobile acquisition? Just want to simply enter the mobile phone market, or is there a bigger game of chess?
Intelligent transformation is too fast, Geely's existing ecology urgently needs to be "expanded"
The acceleration of the 5G era has opened up a new battlefield for automotive intelligent networking, and whoever can build and improve their platform here as soon as possible can dominate the future. As an independent "brother", Geely Automobile actually realized this very early and began the layout of the field of intelligent networked vehicles as early as 2011. There is an important time cut-off point during this period, that is, in 2016, Mr. Li Shufu and Mr. Shen Ziyu co-founded Egatong Technology Co., Ltd., which proposed solutions for automotive intelligent cockpits, including Geely Galaxy OS and GKUI Geek Intelligent Ecosystem, all of which were from the company's hands, and in 2019, it also released the first E-series car machine chip independently led by MediaTek.
It must be emphasized that the GKUI Geek Intelligent Ecosystem has been implemented on more than 20 models of Geely Automobile, with a cumulative user of more than one million, so the GKUI Geek Intelligent Ecosystem with a huge user group will become the key to the transformation of Geely Automobile in the future, so where is it strong?
The first is the control ecology, which can provide a mobile phone-like experience, commonly used applications are presented on the desktop in the form of UI, and the control will push relevant information, making it easier for users to learn and operate; secondly, the AI cloud, which can realize the interconnection of cars and machines, can provide better voice services, recommendation distribution, third-party content services; in addition, the developer platform provides 3 development services, opens 119 APIs and 118 sensors and data, and the important thing is that third-party developers can build this intelligent ecosystem. At the same time, including QQ Music, Kuwo, Kugou, Tencent News, as well as the mapping systems of AutoNavi, Baidu and Tencent, the GKUI geek intelligent ecosystem is supported.
It is worth mentioning that intelligent hardware and all-round ID function as one of the core of the GKUI geek intelligent ecosystem, users only need to through an account, you can achieve the control of intelligent hardware, or use mobile phones, wearable devices to control the vehicle, and then realize the ecological closed loop of "AI cloud, vehicle, smart home, smart phone, smart watch".
However, from the current layout of Geely in various fields, only the most important mobile phone business is still in its infancy, which is obviously inconsistent with the rapid transformation of Geely's development. What worries Geely even more is that mobile phones, as intelligent control terminals, are not only communication devices, social tools, personal wallets, transportation cards, controllers and other tools, but the carrier of big data collection and a new medium in the field of smart cars, so the important "territory" of mobile phones, Geely must "spell" as soon as possible.
Entering the mobile phone market, there are challenges in the short term, but must win?
With the rapid disappearance of the incremental market, major mobile phone manufacturers began to stock the market game, Apple, Huawei, millet, "OV" head manufacturers advantages in the industry reshuffle further highlighted, but at the same time some small and medium-sized manufacturers survival pressure continues to increase. According to relevant data reports, in the fourth quarter of 2021, the world's top five mobile phone manufacturers in global smartphone shipments together won 71% of the market share, while small manufacturers such as Meizu only received 29% of the market share. In addition, according to relevant news, the sales of Meizu mobile phones have continued to decline in recent years, from 22 million units sold in 2016 to about 400,000 units in 2020, and according to the data released by BCI, from December 28, 2020 to January 31, 2021, Meizu's market share is only 0.1%.
At the same time, Meizu mobile phone itself there are many other problems, such as the living space is squeezed by the head brand at the same time, there is no supply chain and funds have no right to speak, no financial support, it is difficult to feed a huge technical team, and before Meizu announced that Flyme's mobile phone cloud backup is about to be discontinued, it also explains Meizu's current difficulties.
Since there are many problems, why does Geely still want to buy Meizu mobile phones? The answer is to take a fancy to Meizu's intellectual property rights in the field of mobile phones and has a mature technical team. First of all, in terms of intellectual property rights, according to the relevant data disclosed by Meizu a few years ago, Meizu patent applications have reached 3358, of which 2490 invention patents, including mBack interaction, one-size-fits-all antenna, and Super mCharge fast charging technology based on charge pump technology, are the first to be developed by Meizu; meizu zero, the world's first integrated true non-porous all-wireless mobile phone Meizu zero, which was created in early 2019, has gathered more than 100 patent application results. Therefore, these patents have considerable value for Geely's mobile phone market.
In terms of the research and development team, although due to some reasons, a large number of talents of the original Flyme team have been poached, but the core value is still there, in short, the current Flyme system still condenses Meizu's years of in-depth exploration of the user experience of smart phones; the design concept of simplifying complexity, there are still a number of audience users; the precise control of user habits, some experience in optimization and debugging software, has also been at the forefront of the industry.
So even if Meizu is not in a good situation recently, it still has a professional mobile phone team, a lot of intellectual property rights, and more importantly, the genes and potential to do high-end mobile phones, which is what Geely Auto values most. At the same time, the layout of the mobile phone market earlier, in fact, can also see that Geely wants to find the right time to enter the mobile phone market, otherwise it will not announce an investment of 10 billion yuan to enter the mobile phone market, nor will it inject 50 million US dollars to feed a research and development team of more than 1,000 people. On the basis of sitting on the basis of a huge automobile supply chain, chips and funds, the acquisition of Meizu mobile phones can not only quickly solve Meizu's current problems, but also help their mobile phone business develop rapidly.
The mobile phone business took off, and the car moat naturally came into being
Some people say that the future of smart cars is actually a shell, there is a soul of the overall intelligent solution, so car companies want to have more big data resources, create an independent ecological chain, grasp the dominant power, and enter the mobile phone market has become a shortcut. If all goes well, after the Geely mobile phone business takes off, it can better integrate resources for its own GKUI geek intelligent ecosystem, its own mobile phone business, and more fields, so as to establish a car moat belonging to Geely. But the question is how, or what benefits can users get?
Here we must first talk about some advantages of Meizu mobile phones. Compared with other mobile phone manufacturers, the biggest feature of Meizu is that the Flyme mobile phone system is very characteristic, pure, smooth and in line with user habits. In that era when the mobile phone processor is not strong enough and the "Android camp" mobile phone caton is serious, the Meizu mobile phone equipped with the Flyme system has achieved a level second only to Apple's IOS through the minimalist concept and a large number of compilation and optimization. And the game mode, personal assistant, full-screen gestures, split-screen display, Aicy voice, etc. in the Flyme system are also the advantages of high user usage.
Then meizu mobile phone and GKUI geek intelligent ecosystem after the strong combination, Geely's future smart cockpit is bound to produce qualitative changes, for example: in the future after watching some videos on the mobile phone, the relevant data will be shared to your car machine system, and when you get on the car, the system will automatically present the record of your last time you watched; when you use your mobile phone to query related cuisines and destinations, the address will also be automatically shared to your car machine system navigation, convenient for your next trip. With the big data provided by the mobile phone, the car machine system can also share the living habits of all users, adjust the seat position, adjust the temperature in the car, and even play songs that different users like according to different user identities; when sharing to your "anniversary", the system will take the initiative to issue reminders and recommend restaurants that are suitable for you.
Of course, these are only basic, with the Flyme system more than 100 million user activations, the future geely's smart cockpit can easily obtain the user's habits, analyze the system menu logic, system fluency, Internet of Things usage frequency, like the application, so as to optimize the upgrade in each OTA, and even for car owners who like to study, launch a "developer mode", so that users can participate in the construction of the smart cockpit, so that many bugs on the car system are now easier to solve.
All in all, the big data obtained by the mobile phone business can allow Geely's smart cockpit to face users directly, improve the human-vehicle interaction experience, and at the same time promote the digital transformation of its own company, achieve more linkage and so on. Therefore, as long as the Geely mobile phone business takes off, it can build a user ecological chain across borders and build a corporate moat according to law, so that the intelligent transformation will also come to fruition, and more importantly, the future initiative will be in its own hands.
summary:
There is no doubt that Geely's acquisition of Meizu is ostensibly to enter the mobile phone market, but it is also to obtain the "resources" it wants to find a shortcut to intelligent transformation. In the era of "Internet of Everything", mobile phones have a greater impact on the transformation of all walks of life, so once the mobile phone business takes off, then Geely can quickly build a user ecological chain, build an ecological moat, and seize the initiative of the future automobile market.