2010 was a key year for China's smartphone market.
In June of that year, Jobs released the epoch-making iPhone 4, officially setting off a wave of smartphones. In December, Huawei decided not to focus on operator customization machines, but to establish its own brand and improve the strategic position of mobile phone business.
However, the top mobile phone brands in China that year were Nokia, Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson and Motorola.
But the rise of smartphones is unstoppable, and Chinese smartphone brands are moving to the center of the stage.
In 2011, Motorola, the "king" of the feature console era, was acquired by Google, and Nokia's market share also declined rapidly. In August, OPPO's first full-keyboard smartphone X903 was launched, officially entering the field of smart phones. In November, Vivo released its first smartphone V1. In December, the 1,999 yuan Xiaomi mobile phone 1 was put on sale, and the number of bookings on the official website reached 100,000 three hours later.
Since then, China's smartphone market has embarked on explosive growth and a round of violent reshuffle.
In this process, Huawei has written a story of a sudden rise in the mobile phone industry with a huge investment in research and development for many years, surpassing Samsung with 55.8 million units in the second quarter of 2020 for the first time, becoming the world's first.
But under U.S. sanctions, the story was pressed the pause button at its peak, and the chip became a problem that Huawei's mobile phones could not avoid, and its shipments quickly fell out of the top five.
Eleven years of market changes, by 2021, the top five in China's smartphone market have all been changed - oppo, vivo, Apple, millet and glory, of which "mi OV" is also the third, fourth and fifth in the world.
If this is regarded as the process of domestic mobile phone manufacturers from 0 to 1, then it is more difficult to go from 1 to 10 later.
How to stabilize the basic disk in the field of mobile phones through "high-end" and catch up with the "winning army" in high-end machines - Apple, is a problem for mobile phone manufacturers.
What is more headache for domestic mobile phone manufacturers is that in today's mobile phone market from incremental to stock competition, finding new growth points, or simply stepping into a new industry with more potential, has become an urgent and realistic choice.
In this way, "core-building", "folding screen" and "car-making" have become the three most important keywords for mobile phone manufacturers in the past year.
01 From car building to core building, mobile phone manufacturers have fought in the past year
Mobile phone manufacturers may never be as busy as in 2021 - making chips, launching folding screen mobile phones, building cars, none of which is easy.
From March to December 2021, Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo released their self-developed chips in turn - the surging C1, V1, Mariana X.
Among them, Xiaomi's surging C1 and Vivo's V1 belong to the self-developed image signal processing chip (hereinafter referred to as "ISP"), and OPPO's Mariana X belongs to an image-specific neural network processor (hereinafter referred to as "NPU").
Compared with the complex core, mobile phone manufacturers have launched folding screen mobile phones at a more consistent pace.
In 2021, Xiaomi's folding screen Mix Fold took the lead and pulled the price to within 10,000 yuan, but the phone was the narrowest, longest, thickest, and heaviest, and the follow-up user evaluation was too poor.
OPPO's Find N "killed all sides" at a price of 7699 yuan, becoming the cheapest and most compact horizontal folding mobile phone at the price.
Although the Huawei P50 Pocket released before Christmas Eve is more balanced overall, the high price and the absence of 5G still deter many users.
The latest release of the Glory Magic V did not use the expected UTT glass screen, but relied on Zhao Ming's live twice to drop the mobile phone on the hot search.
The only vivo that has not yet joined the "team" has news that it will take action in early 2022, but there is still no official announcement.
In addition to "tossing" on mobile phones, the larger layout of mobile phone manufacturers in 2021 is naturally to count their electric vehicles.
At the Xiaomi press conference in March 2021, Lei Jun said that he would bet on all the achievements and reputations of his life to build a car for rice noodles. Half a year later, Xiaomi Automobile Entity Company was established, headquartered in Beijing, the factory is located in Yizhuang, the registered capital is 10 billion yuan, and it is expected to achieve mass production in the first half of 2024.
Huawei has made it clear that it "does not build cars", but will help car companies build cars. After the defeat of Cyrus, the AITO Q&I M5 became a smart electric vehicle with deeper and full participation by Huawei, representing Huawei's capabilities in automotive systems and multiple modules.
CEO Chen Mingyong once said in 2019 that he will not enter the automotive industry at present, but if the entire automotive industry does not do well in the next decade, OPPO may enter the automotive industry.
But OPPO obviously can't wait 10 years, in February 2021, OPPO announced a set of car patents, all related to autonomous driving technology, and submitted a trademark application for "OCar" in May, and the outside world has speculated that it has entered the market. In November 2021, indian media reported that OPPO plans to launch the first pure electric vehicle in the local area, which is expected to be released at the end of 2023 or early 2024.
As for vivo, there have been news that Duan Yongping led the oppo and vivo jointly built cars, but it was denied by the three parties.
Until December 2021, a report was also circulated from the Indian media showing that Vivo had submitted trademark applications related to electric vehicles, including electric vehicles, electric motorcycles, driverless cars and electric bicycles.
Behind such desperation is the year-on-year decline in domestic smartphone shipments from 2017 for four consecutive years - from 522 million units in 2016 to 296 million units in 2020, a contraction of 43.31%.
Although relying on the tide of 5G replacement, the annual shipment volume in 2021 has finally increased year-on-year, but the fact that the smartphone market has turned into stock competition is already very obvious.
As a result, mobile phone manufacturers have tried to increase prices and profits through the "high-end" route to offset the impact of declining sales, but "high-end" is not an easy task.
$600 is seen as the dividing line for high-end mobile phones, equivalent to about 4,000 yuan.
A few years after domestic mobile phone manufacturers shouted the slogan of "high-end", according to the latest data released by Counterpoint Research, an authoritative market research institute, in the second quarter of 2021, apple's market share in the global high-end smartphone market was as high as 57%, Samsung was 17%, Huawei fell from 17% to 6% in the same period last year, oppo and millet had 6% and 5% market share respectively.
Obviously, in addition to Huawei's heyday can be called a stage of "success" in China's mobile phone manufacturers, Xiaomi and OV still have a long way to go.
02 The high-end road is difficult to walk
Today, when the global mobile phone industry chain is becoming more mature and the homogenization of mobile phones is becoming more and more serious, through the two paths of making chips and launching folding screen mobile phones, breaking through the dilemma of high-end and becoming the only way for domestic mobile phone manufacturers.
But these two paths have their own difficulties.
Since 2021, the chips launched by various mobile phone manufacturers are basically only ISP chips and NPU chips designed for image and image functions, and are different from the Kirin 9000 that Huawei once built, which is a soc chip.
If the Soc chip is compared to a complete set of buildings, the ISP chip or NPU chip is just a room in the house, responsible for a certain function.
Why not do Soc chips and mostly choose ISP chips?
The reason is that soc chips are too difficult and time-consuming and expensive, and it is difficult to achieve them overnight. Today, when mobile phone shooting has become one of the strongest functions of user perception, by improving the computing power of the chip in the field of video, the image texture is further improved, which has become a more cost-effective, feasible and practical idea.
The task of is the isP chip to optimize the computing power of pictures and images.
From the perspective of the industrial chain, domestic related enterprises have accumulated certain strength in ISP chip manufacturing, forming IP that can be reused, which can shorten the design cycle and improve the success rate of chip design, and also reduce the difficulty of mobile phone manufacturers to "make cores".
In addition, Wit Display analyst Lin Zhi told the market that in the context of the lack of cores, the core is the outlet of a national movement, and the North Stock Exchange and the Science and Technology Innovation Board have provided an outlet for investors in the chip industry, improving the ability to liquidate and reducing investment risks.
Cutting from isp chips to making cores is obviously a more secure path, but it also causes an embarrassing situation that domestic mobile phone manufacturers still cannot match the mobile phone manufacturers with the ability to manufacture Soc chips in the short term.
In contrast, the launch of folding screen mobile phones is a more direct action of mobile phone manufacturers on the road to high-end, but there are still a series of problems.
The price is the most obvious. Stress effect and foldable various materials, directly piled up the price of folding screen mobile phones - the latest folding screen mobile phones on the market, the starting price from 7699 yuan to 14999 yuan, the average price of more than 10,000 yuan, and the straight smart phone is covered from thousands of yuan machines to 10,000 yuan machines.
In terms of weight, the special form of "folding" directly leads to the "overweight" of the mobile phone - the "weight" of the mainstream straight phone is basically controlled between 150-200g, and the folding screen mobile phone is generally around 300g, and the thickness is also about 2 times that of the straight phone.
Of course, users are generally worried about the risk of breaking and damage to the inner screen - the market boundary query found that the internal screen maintenance price displayed on the official website is 4800 yuan, the Current Preferential Price of Huawei Mate X2 is 3999 Yuan, the Preferential Price of Honor Magic V is 3579 Yuan, and the Xiaomi Mix Fold is 3600 Yuan.
The current official price of the Xiaomi MIX Fold has dropped from 9999 yuan to 6999 yuan, which is equivalent to spending more than half of the price of the phone to repair a screen.
In addition, there are problems such as screen creases and application software mismatch, but the biggest problem is that there is no real "needed" practical application scenario.
Tasting every important change in the form of mobile phones in the past is actually inextricably linked to technological updates.
From the evolution of big brother in the 1980s to the thin and light PHS in the 1990s, it is the transformation of 1G to 2G era, communication technology tends to mature, and the mobile phone manufacturing process is also developing rapidly; to the 3G era of the 21st century, with the improvement of network speed, the rapid transmission of audio and pictures has been realized, mobile phones are more often used for entertainment, keyboards gradually disappear, and the screen is gradually getting larger; and then the screen display technology continues to improve, and concepts such as "full screen" and "under-screen camera" have emerged.
Now the 5G era is coming, but the specific application of 5G itself is still quite controversial, the new form of folding screen can produce a new spark with the high-speed transmission of 5G, there is naturally no use scenario that convinces most people, and mobile phone manufacturers can only "open their minds" when advertising, or guide to the "business machine".
The reason why the folding screen mobile phone was launched this year, analyst Lin Zhi believes that the reason is multifaceted: in terms of the market, Samsung launched a vertical folding screen mobile phone after the original horizontal screen folding mobile phone, the cost reduction, the price also fell from 14999 yuan to 7599 yuan, with millions of sales to open the market, so that domestic mobile phone manufacturers saw hope.
In terms of supply chain, there has been a gradual breakthrough in the immature and expensive state of the previous years, the supplier of two important components of folding screen and hinge has increased, and the cover parts have been localized, opening up the possibility of large-scale promotion of the market.
At present, mobile phone manufacturers have the layout of folding screen mobile phones from 7,000 yuan to nearly 20,000 yuan, or are testing the acceptance of domestic consumers for this form of mobile phone.
How the future market is still unknown, but according to the panel supply chain research company DSCC estimates, the annual shipment of folding screen mobile phones in 2021 will be less than 10 million units, while Canalys predicts that the global smartphone market shipments will reach 1.4 billion units in 2021 - folding screen mobile phones account for only about 0.7%, which can be said to be minimal.
It is not realistic to rely on the unfinished folding screen mobile phone to support the banner of high-end in the short term.
03 Building a car is "playing the real thing"
Compared with the rally-like "core- building" and the folding screen mobile phone with little effect in the short term, car manufacturing has become the optimal path for mobile phone manufacturers to open the ceiling theory.
To some extent, today, with the continuous reduction of global shipments, mobile phone manufacturers have realized that it is almost impossible to reverse the market trend by their own efforts. Before the advent of revolutionary new technologies, while maintaining the "basic disk" of the mobile phone industry through high-end, it became a wiser choice to find the next trillion-level market.
Electric cars are a very ideal entrance.
According to the research report of Cinda Securities, the size of China's automobile and aftermarket reached about 10 trillion yuan in 2019, while mobile phones were only less than 1 trillion yuan.
At present, pure electric vehicles only occupy 4% of the automotive market, and they are still in a stage of just starting out, and it is not too late to enter the market.
2024 is the time when Xiaomi announced mass production, and 2025 is the time when the legendary Apple car may be mass-produced.
Other mobile phone manufacturers want to build the whole car, later than this point in time will be very passive, if it is like Huawei, to the role of a solution provider to enter the game, but also to come up with results early.
Prior to this, most mobile phone manufacturers have long formulated the strategy of laying out iot, and penetrating into various scenarios in the lives of users through a variety of terminal devices has become a new goal pursued by mobile phone manufacturers.
If the car can also become one of the many terminal devices, it can not only bind more high-priced users, but also obtain more abundant and detailed data of such users.
With the motivation to build a car, there must also be the ability to build a car.
Domestic smartphone shipments increased from around 95 million units in 2011 to around 390 million units at their peak in 2018. Behind the rise in volume and price, the number of head mobile phone manufacturers is relatively fixed, and it is natural to earn a lot of money.
At the end of 2020, Xiaomi Group had 54.752 billion yuan of monetary funds on its books, ranking 45th among more than 4,600 A-share listed companies – second only to insurance giant Chinese Life and edible oil giant Arowana.
When Xiaomi developed the surging S1 chip by itself, Lei Jun's psychological expectations for the chip project were "10 years" and "1 billion US dollars", and this time he announced that he would invest 10 billion US dollars in car manufacturing.
Compared with the traditional car to hardware production as the primary consideration, in the era of electric vehicles, in addition to the hardware three-electric system, software and ecology have also become an important existence, and this part is what mobile phone manufacturers are good at. Electric cars are therefore called "four-wheeled phones."
(Huang Jen-hoon)
Nvidia founder Jen-Hsun Huang once said in an interview: "The business model of automakers will fundamentally change. By 2025, many automotive companies are likely to sell their cars at near-cost prices and provide value to users primarily through software. ”
On the road of mobile phone manufacturers to build cars, there are also car companies that realize that the commonality of car machines and mobile phones is an important opportunity for creating an ecology, so "wrapping up from the back road" and attacking the mobile phone field has also become a new strategy.
Tesla's rumors of making mobile phones have long been rampant, in the concept machine of the network transmission, Tesla's mobile phone can not only be charged with solar energy, using "StarLink technology" free Internet access, but also can be seamlessly connected with Tesla electric vehicles.
But the news and renderings that have come out are not from the official, may just be the result of netizens' brain holes, and mobile phone industry analysts believe that most of these technologies are not realistic.
In contrast, Geely Automobile has made more specific actions to make mobile phones.
In September 2021, Geely Automobile announced its entry into the mobile phone field, establishing The Star Era, with Li Shufu personally serving as the chairman. Since then, the mobile phone business has become the key layout of its planned investment of 10 billion yuan.
Li Shufu, who cross-border mobile phones, is ambitious, and as soon as he enters the game, he declares that he will create a global high-end mobile phone project, and has applied for four trademarks of "Comer", "Portable Big Screen", "UPON" and "UPUPHONE", and has recruited people with high salaries from mobile phone companies such as Xiaomi and OPPO to form his own research and development team.
The latest news is that Geely may acquire Meizu's mobile phone business, and its Star Era is in contact with Meizu to negotiate acquisitions, but the price has not yet been determined.
Going hand in hand on the two roads of making mobile phones and cars means that there will be more and more opponents of mobile phone manufacturers.
If "core building" is an ambush, then "folding screen" is more like a kind of temptation, which is a passive measure for mobile phone manufacturers to protect the "mobile phone territory" through high-end.
In contrast, "car building" is a kind of initiative to seek greater room for growth and eliminate uneasiness through "self-revolution".
(Author 丨 Lin Xiahuai, Editor 丨 Li Shuguang)