In the new year, Geely has not stopped expanding.
As early as the end of 2011, it was reported that Geely and Lifan Group jointly established a new joint venture company, Chongqing Ruilan Automobile Technology Co., Ltd., in the main direction of attack, especially explained that Ruilan Automobile is committed to creating an intelligent power exchange ecology.
The news a few days ago was that the controlling shareholder of Lifan shares was changed to Chongqing Manjianghong Investment Fund Partnership, and the shareholders of Chongqing Manjianghong were Chongqing Liangjiang Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. and Geely Milestone Investment Co., Ltd.
Geely Milestone is affiliated with Geely, and the other is an industrial investor, consisting of geely Milestone, Geely Technology, or Geely Metrojet/Geely Technology holding more than 70% of the shares.
It sounds a bit winding, but to sum up, Geely has completely pocketed Lifan, and the name "Lifan" has been "removed".
Another news that is still pending is that Geely Automobile is going to buy Meizu.
People from all sides responded ambiguously, but no one said with certainty that this was a piece of false news.
According to the convention, this news is likely to be a real news that broke out in advance.
Although Meizu is not as miserable as Lifan, and has been selling its body to make a living, it is likely to face the same fate as Lifan: eventually lose its name.
Geely certainly isn't selling phones
Geely made mobile phones, is not a news, as early as September 2021 came out of the news, investment of 10 billion, the establishment of Hubei Interstellar Times Technology Co., Ltd., and clearly said to enter the high-end mobile phone market.
Many media outlets have taken stock of the benefits of Geely's actions, notably Egatong Technology, which was founded in 2016 and proposes solutions for automotive smart cockpits, including Geely Galaxy OS and the GKUI Geek Smart Ecosystem.
It can be said that the GKUI geek intelligent ecosystem is specially built for Geely Automobile, if according to sales volume, this has been installed on 20 Geely models, with more than one million users.
However, if compared with other brands, it should be said that the GKUI geek intelligent ecosystem is still an in-vehicle system, and has not realized the ecological closed loop of "AI cloud, vehicle, smart home, smart phone, smart watch".
In terms of the current business map of Geely, this closed-loop standard still has many weak links.
If according to this ecological closed-loop standard, among domestic brands, Xiaomi and Huawei are more likely to achieve this goal, it is not difficult to understand why Geely wants to acquire Meizu: mainstream brands simply cannot give up their "names", and those "others" do not have Meizu's strong technical capabilities.
Xiaomi and Huawei strongly enter the car-making industry, whether it is Lei Jun's 10 billion US dollars, or Huawei is cooperating with various brands to push its own Hongmeng system, if Geely re-buries its head in car building, it is likely that when it looks up again, it will find that all areas in the closed loop have been divided.
This is obviously something that Geely does not want to see.
Acquiring a company that can quickly build a high-end mobile phone is imperative for Geely.
Geely is certainly not to seize the mobile phone market, but to create its own exclusive entrance to its own car: users, traffic, information, are in their own hands, do not rely on people's sniffles, but also for their own use, is the purpose of Geely.
Why Meizu
Meizu should be the best choice for Geely at this stage, even if Meizu's current sales have become others, but Meizu still has the appearance of "down-and-out aristocrats", on meizu's forum, there are a large number of meizu fans, has been supporting meizu, in addition, meizu is now sloppy lack of money, but also did not abandon itself, on the electronic equipment evaluation website, there are still people sharing Meizu speakers, praising it as a speaker that pursues fashion trends.
When commenting on its founder, Huang Zhang, many people use "craftsman".
In the current "craftsman" is not popular time, this word is a neutral word: do not like communication, do not accept interviews, dive in the Meizu forum all year round, like music equipment, dream is to be a vegetable farmer, after Meizu grew, he still often dived on the forum, by the way, to scare fans.
Of course, this personality also led to the problem of Meizu later: since 2010, Huang Zhang has repeatedly jumped between retreat and out of the mountain, and every time he comes back, meizu has encountered problems, and seeing meizu's crisis solved, Huang Zhang is once again invisible behind the scenes.
The result of this, of course, is that Meizu's strategic continuity is poor, and more importantly, Meizu has not really come out of the trough.
Even in 2016, Meizu shipped 22 million units and launched 14 mobile phones to truly achieve profitability, but after that, there was no such achievement.
In 2018, Meizu's shipments hit a discount in half; in 2020, the market estimated that there were only one million units.
But Meizu also has real things, from the public data point of view, Meizu patent applications have reached 3358, of which 2490 invention patents, including mBack interaction, one-size-fits-all antenna, Super mCharge fast charging technology based on charge pump technology; the world's first integrated true non-porous all-wireless mobile phone Meizu zero created in early 2019, but also gathered more than 100 patent application results.
Although there is a good accumulation of technology and the recognition of die-hard users, there is no new resource, and Meizu's life will only become more and more difficult.
Another public case
Although he was the first to become "China's Jobs", it is obvious that Huang Zhang's Meizu did not become an Apple, but Lei Jun made the name of "Rebbs" real.
In that year, Lei Jun left Jinshan to contact various start-ups as an angel investor, Meizu was one of them, and it is said that the Coke in Huang Zhang's office was specially prepared for Lei Jun.
Lei Jun has money, Huang Zhang has products, the two people seem to hit it off, but in the end, Lei Jun made a mobile phone, and the original favorite "CEO" became a friend in the blink of an eye, no wonder Huang Zhang will be difficult to calm.
It is said that in Meizu's forum, there was a time when Lei Jun and Xiaomi could not be discussed.
Of course, Lei Jun's response was that this was Huang Zhang's one-sided statement.
Now, Lei Jun's announcement of car manufacturing has become one of the potential dangers of various traditional car companies.
And Geely's announcement of making mobile phones also seems to have the meaning of secretly poking and poking to compete with Xiaomi, and even blocking Xiaomi's future road.
It seems that the end of the public case of Huang Zhang and Lei Jun will be written in Li Shufu.
Time will give everyone the answer, and a momentary loss and a loss may be the cause of another story, with another ending.