Zhi DongXi (public number: zhidxcom)
Author | Yunpeng
Edit | Heart edge
Just after the New Year holiday, a variety of new machines such as domestic Redmi, realme, OPPO, and Lenovo Savior are ready to go, and the head-to-head duel between Tianji 9000 and Snapdragon 8 is also about to start, and the smart phone Tiger Year drama is about to be staged.
Looking back at the smart phone market in 2021, it can basically be summarized with "inner volume": the thousand-yuan machine uses the flagship core, the fast charge still rushes to a new high after breaking through the 100 watts, the screen material is upgraded two generations a year to begin to "squeeze toothpaste", and even the family has to take out a "self-developed chip" to dare to speak straight.
There is no doubt that the hand-to-hand combat between manufacturers' close-fitting technology is becoming more and more intense.
The good news is that the smartphone market shipments have finally ended 5 consecutive years of decline, ushering in positive growth in 2021, and whether it is the AIoT era of the Internet of Everything, or the visible future under the concept of the explosive meta-universe, mobile phones are still the core smart devices that people rely on.
▲ Data source: IDC
After the New Year, in the face of 2022, from the perspective of technological innovation and industrial development, what will be the hard-core game of technology in the field of smart phones, and what variables will there be in the market pattern? How the smartphone market will go in 2022, these 10 showdowns may become a key inflection point.
First, the chip "has no choice", tuning is the key, self-developed chip bright sword
From the global lack of cores to Huawei's sanctions by the United States, the importance of chips in the mobile phone industry has been raised to an unprecedented height.
In 2022, the competition of smartphone manufacturers in the chip field will also become more and more intense. On the one hand, the product gap between Qualcomm, MediaTek and other head players is getting smaller and smaller, none of them can have an absolute leading edge, and the ability to compete with terminal manufacturers has become the highlight; on the other hand, self-developed chips have also become the key technology highland.
At present, there are only a few head mobile phone SoC manufacturers, Apple is a faction of its own, Samsung Exynos series is only used in its own models and a small number of vivo models, for domestic millet, glory, OPPO, vivo and other mainstream mobile phone manufacturers, Qualcomm and MediaTek are still the only two choices.
Although the 5G SoC has been mass-produced and commercialized, it will take time to enter the mainstream models of the head manufacturers.
Although mobile phone manufacturers have played vigorously, they have all "advertised" chip manufacturers.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 and MediaTek Tianji 9000 two flagship chips, based on the same Armv9 architecture, with similar "1+3+4" CPU core configuration, close 4nm process, similar three ISP image processing modules and the same soaring AI computing power, so that the gap at the chip level gradually narrowed.
▲Left: Snapdragon 8, Right: Tianji 9000
For manufacturers, how to make chips better exert their capabilities through their own tuning and self-developed software algorithms is the key to competition.
For example, how to balance performance and power consumption is the biggest problem facing manufacturers. Nowadays, the problem of "fever" seems to have become a "red line" in the mobile phone industry.
From the recent release of the Snapdragon 8 flagship machine we can see that the tuning ideas of each manufacturer are different, some pursue the ultimate performance, and the temperature is relatively sacrificed, such as the realme GT2 series; some strictly control the temperature and maintain performance within a certain range, such as the Xiaomi 12 series; also organic, the performance has not reached a higher level, and the heat is directly "broken".
Mobile phone manufacturers say that they are reasonable and justified, and they all feel that they have mastered the "true meaning of how to train their dragons".
It can be seen that although the performance of chips is getting stronger and stronger, the upgrade of chip architecture and the upgrading of semiconductor processes have a slowdown trend, so how terminal manufacturers can adjust a chip is becoming more and more important.
In 2022, the gap between chip platforms of different manufacturers will be further narrowed, and how to make their products stand out will test the skills of various manufacturers in various software technologies and algorithms.
It is precisely because the general chip platform has such a "dilemma", all kinds of self-developed chips have begun to appear in our field of vision, Xiaomi surging P1 fast charging chip, vivo's ISP chip V1, OPPO's image NPU Mariana X have appeared, and some have landed in flagship products.
▲From left to right: vivo V1, OPPO Mariana X, Xiaomi surging P1
From imaging to charging, self-developed chips have become the only choice for manufacturers to strengthen their advantages in vertical fields.
At present, Apple's self-developed 5G baseband chip will release more information this year, and is expected to be officially landed in next year's iPhone 15, and OPPO is also in the layout of self-developed communication baseband, according to industry insiders, OPPO has dug up a lot of Chip Developers from MediaTek and HiSilicon on this project.
Sources said that behind the successful landing of Mariana X, there was a close relationship with Zhu Shangzu, former general manager of MediaTek mobile phones in oppo's core team, Li Zonglin, deputy general manager of the mobile phone department, and other key figures, and Li Zonglin and TSMC maintained a good relationship for many years.
High-paid digging, the establishment of "special forces" to attack the subdivision of the field of chips, mobile phone manufacturers to grab the chip talent is really not soft.
Some people said that Xiaomi's second-generation surging C2 ISP chip is also about to come out, or land in the second-generation new product of MIX FOLD folding screen mobile phone, when Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo will launch an important contest around self-developed chips in image processing.
Mobile phones are inseparable from chips, and whether it is the tuning of general chips or the death of self-developed chips, it will become the main theme of the mobile phone chip war in 2022.
Second, the folding screen that blooms everywhere, which one is strong? The spring of domestic screens will be longer
In the past two months, OPPO, Huawei, and Honor have successively released three folding screen mobile phones, and the minimum price has also come to about 7600 yuan, compared with the price of more than 10,000 yuan at the beginning of the birth of folding screen mobile phones in 2019, the threshold has been reduced.
▲From left to right: OPPO Find N, Honor Magic V, Huawei P50 Pocket
Not only to kill the price, when the folding screen is released, it will post a long "patent list", saying that it has mastered the "core technology", afraid that the research and development departments of each family will be put together, and it is inevitable that there will be a war of words.
In addition to the manufacturers that have joined the battlefield, Vivo's first folding screen will land on the NEX series, which will be launched this year, and following the launch of the first folding screen mobile phone MIX FOLD last year, Xiaomi's second-generation folding screen mobile phone is also about to come out and will be released within the year.
▲2018-2021 global mainstream mobile phone manufacturers folding screen model statistics, according to public information collation
One of the domestic head screen manufacturers, Shen Tianma, has relevant people tell Zhidong that there will be more folding screen mobile phones in 2022, which is beyond doubt.
As a manufacturer that currently occupies an absolute shipment advantage in the global folding screen mobile phone market, Samsung will face the challenge of more domestic entrants this year.
According to Samsung's shipment plan, Samsung plans to ship 13 million folding screen mobile phones in 2022, accounting for about 4% of the total shipment plan of 334 million mobile phones. Previously, Samsung replaced the previous high-end Note series with folding screen mobile phones, so folding screen mobile phones will also become one of the core products of Samsung's mobile phone business.
According to Counterpoint data, for every 10 folding screen phones sold worldwide, nearly 9 are Samsung. Nowadays, domestic manufacturers have released new folding screen machines, without exception, fully benchmarking Samsung, which has the meaning of the latecomers.
▲Samsung folding screen model statistics
The two core technologies behind the folding screen mobile phone are the screen and the hinge, and the flexible AMOLED technology and hinge technology currently used for the folding screen mobile phone are constantly maturing, and domestic manufacturers such as BOE, TCL Huaxing, Changxin Technology, Jingyan Technology and other manufacturers are actively laying out in the folding screen related technology field.
At the same time, the adoption of domestic screen solutions by domestic mobile phone manufacturers has also fed the development of the domestic screen industry.
The driving effect of this industrial chain is not only reflected in the field of folding screens, but also in the field of more widely used AMOLED screens, such as millet, glory, OPPO, vivo and other domestic mainstream mobile phone manufacturers, are improving the proportion of domestic screens.
Xiaomi has just released the Xiaomi Mi 12 flagship series using the AMOLED screen jointly developed with TCL Huaxing.
The smartphone screen war is not only a game between mobile phone terminal manufacturers, but also a contest between domestic screen manufacturers and Korean screen giants.
Third, taking pictures into the era of 200 million pixels, "continuous light change" who is the first mass production?
In the past two years, mobile phone pixels have jumped rapidly from 48 million pixels to 100 million pixels, nearly 5 times, and Samsung and Howey Technology have also released 200 million pixel sensors in succession years ago.
Left: Samsung, Right: Howey
The debate about the "big outsole" and "high pixels" seems to have been extinguished, in fact, the outsole can be made of high pixels, and the high pixels are inseparable from the outsole as the foundation, and the two are not contradictory. At the beginning, the users of several mobile phone brands also set off a fierce discussion on the Internet.
In 2022, 200 million pixels will inevitably land on the mobile phone side, and on top of "who is bigger than whom", who can optimize the photo experience of the 200 million pixel sensor better will inevitably become one of the focuses of the competition.
In the smartphone industry, there seems to be a trend of "first strike is not winning, who optimizes first wins".
However, a mobile phone lens module leader Shunyu Optical Technology related people told Zhi dong that the current mobile phone imaging is already "clear" enough, how to do more light and thin on this basis, while the screen camera to do more insensitive should be some of the main directions of the follow-up force.
In his view, "continuous micro-innovation" may be the main work of manufacturers and supply chain companies in the field of mobile phone photography in 2022.
In addition to shooting more clearly, the experience of telephoto shooting will also become the focus of this year's manufacturers' competition. A few years ago, TRANSSION released a 5x optical zoom retractable lens that can take into account both telephoto and macro shooting. According to the supply chain information, there are already similar module programs in China, which are currently in the final stage before mass production.
Whether it is the telescopic lens solution previously demonstrated by Xiaomi or the continuous optical zoom lens module released by OPPO last year, it shows that continuous zoom must be the optimization direction of telephoto shooting.
▲From left to right: Transsion, Xiaomi, OPPO
However, the new continuous zoom module from the birth of the program to the final landing, but also to face many challenges, terminal manufacturers and module manufacturers, algorithm manufacturers between the joint tuning and polishing is a test of the foundation of the place.
Just like the telephoto photography revolution caused by Huawei's periscope lens in that year, whoever takes the lead in successfully landing continuous zoom technology on the mobile phone side and perfecting the experience is bound to grasp the key nodes in the 2022 smartphone camera war.
Fourth, charge for 10 minutes full of blood or become the norm, in addition to fast, but also spell AI algorithms
How fast is the phone charging? 1 hour, 1 hour, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes? From 2020 mobile phone fast charging power to the "100 watts" era, today, ten minutes of full charge seems to have become a common thing.
Today, it seems that the fast charge is not more than 100 watts, and they are embarrassed to say that they are equipped with "fast charge".
According to the filing information of the Red Devil 7 game phone, its charger supports a fast charging protocol of up to 165W, and the charging speed will be further improved.
However, after charging came to 100 Watts, manufacturers also began to look for new directions of power, such as the security and intelligence proposed by OPPO, and Xiaomi used the self-developed fast charging chip P1 to achieve an effective balance between power and power.
As more hard-core technologies begin to be reflected in charging, the addition of AI algorithms has also become one of the important highlights this year.
How to make mobile phone charging more intelligent, such as according to the user's use of the use of the appropriate charging program, how to better improve the service life of the battery? Are the directions that manufacturers will focus on polishing.
Not only the mobile phone should understand you better, but also the charging should understand the user better.
And manufacturers in the battery materials, fast charging chips and other "hard" technology exploration has also begun to accelerate the pace, millet, OPPO and other manufacturers are in the layout of the field of intelligent cars, and fast charging and battery materials are also the key technologies of smart cars, the bottom of which is interconnected, which also makes people more look forward to what kind of surprises they can bring to us.
Fifth, the thousand yuan machine kills the red eye, and realme and Redmi stage a battle of "guarding the door and breaking the door"
Today, many people may not know that realme has become the world's sixth largest smartphone manufacturer in just over two years since its establishment, ranking after Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo, and has surpassed Huawei and Glory.
One of the core advantages of realme at present is its death to "cost performance", last year, they will mediatek Tianji 1200 flagship chip landing model, to the thousand yuan machine gear, but also launched a hundred yuan 5G mobile phone.
There is no doubt that realme's most important opponent in China is Redmi, and Redmi boss Lu Weibing and realme head Xu Qi also often "air to line" on social media, causing heated discussion among fans of their respective brands.
Redmi once shouted the slogan of "welder", and then realme set the goal of "goalkeeper", which can be said to be full of gunpowder.
At the moment when the smart phone market is fiercely "inner volume", the thousand yuan machine market, as one of the main segments of the domestic mobile phone market shipment, is bound to continue to become a key battlefield for manufacturers to compete.
In addition to realme and Redmi, vivo and the glory of the new life will not give up the previous traditional advantage of the "thousand yuan machine" battlefield, the low-end market who can break through the siege, is still full of unknowns.
Sixth, the family shouted to rush the high-end, is the high-end machine really so fragrant?
In addition to the scorching competition in the thousand-yuan machine market, the high-end market is also a new battlefield for smartphone manufacturers to target.
It is undeniable that after the limited supply of Huawei chips, the mobile phone business has been significantly affected, and Huawei's folding has also allowed other domestic mobile phone manufacturers to see opportunities and begin to accelerate the layout of the high-end market.
Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun shouted the slogan of comprehensive benchmarking apple, and the goal of competing for the first place in three years is also Apple. The glory of the new students also shouted to comprehensively benchmark apples and learn from apples.
Liu Bo, vice president of OPPO and president of China, said at the press conference, "Only Huawei apple at the high end, there will be OPPO in the future three points of the world", which shows that OPPO will also target the high-end market in the future. Although vivo is relatively low-key, it is also constantly advancing to the high-end market in terms of product layout, and the flagship machine has even come to the 6,000 yuan gear.
▲From top to bottom: Xiaomi, OPPO, Honor
According to the statistics of Rising Sun Big Data, in the third quarter of 2021, among the top 20 best-selling mobile phones in the world, models with more than 800 US dollars accounted for a quarter, more than double the proportion compared with the same period in 2020.
The impact of products on high-end is also one of the major trends in the development of the current smartphone market.
On the one hand, compared with the simple low-end model, high-end machines can bring manufacturers more profits, after the global mobile phone market shipment growth encountered a bottleneck, really making more money is one of the key factors for manufacturers to survive.
Xiaomi began to focus on expanding the high-end market, after the average price of mobile phones increased, the net profit of the financial report has been really improved, and more cash flow has also given Xiaomi the courage to shout out five years to invest 100 billion yuan in research and development, and to force the car business.
On the other hand, today's game of smart phone manufacturers is paying more and more attention to the breakthrough of hard-core self-developed technology, and self-developed technology means a lot of investment, which requires real money and silver instead of shouting slogans. And these new technological breakthroughs should also be landed with high-end flagship machines, rather than taking the volume model.
It can be said that the competition in the high-end market is already inevitable.
Of course, although the domestic manufacturers shouted loudly, Apple's sales in the fourth quarter suppressed all domestic manufacturers and reached the top of the Chinese market, or told everyone who is the real "father" in the high-end market.
The high-end road of Chinese smartphone manufacturers still has a long way to go.
7. Xiaomi Wanjia stores smashed offline channels, how does Huarong OV respond?
The battle of offline channels also seems to be one of the focuses of the showdown between smartphone manufacturers in 2022. To this day, 70% of The Chinese smartphone market still comes from offline.
By the beginning of December last year, the number of Xiaomi's offline stores had exceeded 11,600, and the number of new stores with a monthly growth rate reached 254, and among the more than 10,000 offline stores, the proportion of official direct stores such as Xiaomi Home was about 45%.
Three years ago, Xiaomi stores increased by more than 200 per year, and today, Xiaomi stores have increased by 254 per month.
During the same period, the number of Huawei's offline stores was about 9,600, and the number of stores was decreasing every month; the number of official direct sales stores of Vivo was about 5,000, and the number of new stores was about 274 in two months.
While Xiaomi actively entered, Huawei quietly left the market.
Xiaomi's strengthening of the construction of the offline market is bound to compete with the existing OPPO, vivo, and Huawei, which take offline channels as the traditional advantages, and Honor is also currently working on the construction of offline stores, so that more consumers can feel that Glory is no longer a "sub-brand" attached to Huawei.
It is foreseeable that in 2022, the expansion of offline channels of mobile phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and Glory will still accelerate, and how to formulate sales strategies for the offline market and what considerations will be given in product line planning are worth further attention.
Eighth, the operating system is a fragrant food, but whether the experience can be "passed" is the key
In the past two years, the landing speed of Huawei's Hongmeng operating system has gradually accelerated, and today, we can basically see that Huawei is targeting the IoT market that they believe has a broader space after the mobile phone business is blocked, and the Hongmeng operating system is the underlying operating system for the IoT field.
Obviously, huawei is not the only one who thinks of doing the IoT operating system, nor is Huawei alone.
Xiaomi simultaneously released the MIUI Family operating system for AIoT at the launch of the Xiaomi 12 series, and even launched the smart central control device MIUI Home. That is to say, in the Xiaomi ecological mobile phones, watches, tablets, TVs and other products, the future will be equipped with MIUI custom system.
▲Top: Huawei, Bottom: Xiaomi
Based on this, Xiaomi can realize the free flow of applications and services between different devices, and the applications running on different terminals can also achieve cross-device "relay" operation. Even in the pull-down control center, Xiaomi has also launched the Xiaomi Mi Magic Center function, which is very similar to Huawei's "HyperTerminal" function.
In the live broadcast of the conference video, netizens directly called out "There is an inner taste!" ”
According to industry information, OPPO is also testing the interconnection and collaboration between multiple terminals, from mobile phones and tablets to mobile phones, headphones, watches, tablets, TVs, and laptops to achieve better collaboration.
At OPPO's developer conference, we can also see that OPPO has a "3+X+N" layout in terms of technology, from mobile phones to AIoT, similarly, Huawei has long clarified the "1+8+N" all-scenario intelligent ecological strategy, and Xiaomi also has the core strategy of "mobile phone x AIoT" and uses this technology layout.
The concept of "Internet of Everything" has been mentioned for many years, and multi-device collaboration will inevitably continue to become the focus of manufacturers' efforts, and the establishment and improvement of the underlying operating system has become a step that manufacturers who want to do "ecology" must take.
But the most important thing about the operating system is to be "used", in addition to their own products, who can get more recognition from ecological manufacturers will become one of the key factors to win.
Everyone wants to be their own, whether they can play it or not is another matter.
Nine, the AIoT market has become another red sea for mobile phone manufacturers to fight
Since the AIoT underlying operating system is mentioned, the hardware layout in the AIoT field is naturally one of the key battlefields.
As an early manufacturer, Xiaomi currently has obvious advantages in the field of hardware ecology in the domestic AIoT market. The types of equipment that Mijia ecology can cover are also relatively complete among various manufacturers.
But even in such a situation, Honor, OPPO, vivo and other manufacturers still have to increase the layout of the AIoT hardware ecosystem.
The most typical is the TWS headphone category, from 2020 to 2021, the family showed off their own TWS headphones, basically you one of me, each one supports active noise reduction, ultra-long endurance, and the price is also directly killed to the "hundred yuan level", for a time, the cottage TWS headphones are a bit chaotic.
In addition to TWS headphones, according to industry information, OPPO and realme's tablet computers are about to be launched this year, and realme's laptop products have even preceded OPPO and landed on sale in the second half of last year. OPPO's first tablet will be expected to be positioned as "cost-effective".
▲Realme Book
Vivo, on the other hand, is also expected to launch tablet products in the first half of this year.
At that time, Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo will basically achieve comprehensive coverage from mobile phones to tablets to laptops, headphones, and watches.
In terms of TV product lines in the field of smart homes, OPPO and realme have already begun to lay out, and have entered the TV market through several cost-effective products.
Of course, on the one hand, it is also because in the current mature state of China's supply chain, if you want to make a tablet, laptop or watch, headphones, tv, you only need to "pay money", and the rest of the supply chain can be done for manufacturers.
In this way, the cost of terminal manufacturers to expand the hardware category will be greatly reduced, and they do not have to start from scratch.
On the other hand, abandoning the more "virtual" concept of ecological construction, but from the perspective of revenue, no one will give up a piece of the cake of incremental business.
In 2020, the global tablet pc market shipments increased by 13.6% year-on-year, with a shipment size of about 164 million units; in 2020, the global TWS headset shipments were 233 million units, an increase of 85% year-on-year, and last year's shipments were expected to exceed 300 million units; in 2020, the global laptop shipments were 235 million units, an increase of 11% year-on-year, and the TV shipments were 225 million units, ushering in the highest peak in seven years...
▲ 2021 Q3 global wearable market shipments, data source: IDC
It can be seen that mobile phone manufacturers actively layout these categories, whether it is the shipment volume of more than 100 million yuan or the year-on-year growth rate that far exceeds the mobile phone, which proves its potential.
Compared with smartphones that have entered the stock market, from the perspective of revenue, the layout of these categories can also make the financial statements more beautiful, of course, provided that the cost is controllable and the product is really paid.
10. Overseas epidemic "bright red light", how can Mi OV continue the overseas road?
The final challenge may not stem from internal competition among manufacturers, but the smartphone industry as a whole will still face the severe challenges of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in 2022.
With the spread of various new mutant strains around the world, the current overseas epidemic situation is not optimistic, as of the middle of January this year, overseas daily new confirmed cases, of which Southeast Asia, Europe, India and other regions and countries are more serious epidemic situation.
▲Epidemic situation map in mid-January, source: Baidu epidemic real-time big data report
At present, xiaomi, honor, OPPO, vivo and other major domestic manufacturers to expand overseas key markets in India, Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia. As a very important piece of the North American market, it has long been almost monopolized by Apple Samsung, and it is difficult for domestic manufacturers to enter.
Therefore, the epidemic still has a certain impact on the overseas business of domestic manufacturers, especially for Xiaomi, whose overseas business revenue has accounted for more than half, and the shipment of mobile phones in overseas markets has accounted for more than 75%. The decline in Xiaomi's global shipments in the third quarter of this year also has a lot to do with this.
Compared with Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and glory, as manufacturers with a slightly weaker overseas market foundation, will also encounter no small challenges in the layout of overseas markets where the epidemic is still raging in 2022.
But at present, the saturation of the domestic mobile phone market is far more than the aforementioned emerging markets such as Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, and from the perspective of competing shipments alone, on the basis of domestic "dead ends", more opportunities may be found in emerging markets.
Conclusion: Whether you can stabilize the upward trend, 2022 will become a key year
Whether from the perspective of technological innovation or changes in the industrial pattern, the competition in the smart phone market in 2022 is still very fierce. And the more hardcore technical duel has become the main theme: the attention of chips and operating systems is getting higher and higher.
In 2021, the smartphone market ushered in the first year-on-year increase in sales in nearly five years, and in 2022, whether manufacturers can maintain the heat of the consumer market through this showdown and make the rise of the smartphone industry become the norm will be crucial.