Geely makes mobile phones, not only for the sake of car machines, but also for the fightback of car companies.
Author | Liu Jane
Edit | Zhang Dong
"Li Shufu is not a person who is 'self-contained', or even a 'car maniac', he likes change." Someone once commented on it.
When he first entered the automotive industry, Li Shufu led Geely to shout out the slogan - to build a cheap car that Chinese can afford, priced at 40,000 yuan. At that time, the domestic market of joint venture car companies competed for deer, and few of them were truly home-grown independent brands; in the same period, the cheapest Xiali car on the market was also priced at more than 50,000 yuan.
Today, under the premise that the car is basically stable, Geely's imperial territory has also expanded to mobile phones, aircraft, and even artificial satellites beyond cars.
Especially mobile phones. Last year, Geely officials announced their entry into the mobile phone industry and threatened to spend 10 billion yuan in the field. Recently, Geely's mobile phone plan seems to have ushered in a further dynamic, that is, the acquisition of Meizu.
A number of media reported at the end of January that the acquisition of Geely Group's mobile phone company Xingji Times and Meizu was in the due diligence stage, and the purchase price was awaiting further disclosure. In this regard, the attitude of the two sides is ambiguous, and it has not been explicitly denied at present.
From the conventional cognition to understand, Geely's acquisition of Meizu-made mobile phones must be inextricably linked to the "car machine". But what is quite embarrassing is that Geely has incubated the automotive intelligent technology company Yijiatong in 2016 to create an intelligent networking ecology around the car machine.
Under the intersection of such relationships, some insiders close to Geely said bluntly to the new intelligent driving, "Geely is not very good at self-research, and he can't figure out (the car machine) so he is looking for foreign aid." ”
Perhaps even more so, there are other deep meanings behind Geely's collection of charmers and mobile phones, and it is not just staring at the car machine.
Big Brother has a lot of difficulties
Although geely proposed the electrification transformation is not too late, from the market feedback, Geely's performance is not top-notch, especially as an "independent brother".
In terms of electrification, the Polar Star built with Volvo seems to have been considered a failed project: the brand has changed coaches twice in less than three years of its establishment; the product has no accurate positioning and brand tone; in 2021, the number of PoleStars in the Chinese market is only about 1,000.
In addition, Lucet, who geely took over, is also in the exploratory stage of electrification transformation. The highly anticipated Krypton 001 will only deliver more than 6,000 vehicles in 2021.
Relevant data show that in 2021, Geely's new energy and electrified models will have a cumulative sales volume of about 100,000 vehicles throughout the year. In contrast, BYD's cumulative sales of new energy vehicles exceeded 600,000 units; Great Wall Motor's cumulative sales of new energy vehicles totaled about 140,000 units; and the cumulative sales of Xiaopeng Automobile, a new car-making force, was 98,000 units.
In terms of intelligence, Yijiatong is a key partner of Geely. As of June last year, the GKUI system developed by EGAT for Geely Automobile has been installed in more than 40 models and has 2.5 million users.
In the view of Liang Xi, a KOL in the automotive industry, although the proportion of the industry of Yijiatong is acceptable, there is still a large room for improvement in its core software experience.
Perhaps, it is the above development status quo that prompts Geely Automobile to think about a new path to break through, and entering the mobile phone industry is one of the links that cannot be ignored.
Li Shufu once publicly expressed his views on mobile phones:
"The mobile phone business has far-reaching significance for the entire Geely automobile industry. The better development of mobile phones can bring better development of vehicles and machines, and the better development of vehicles and machines can promote the continuous improvement of the level of intelligent cockpits, which can help the competitiveness of intelligent electric vehicles to continuously improve. ”
Regarding Geely's mobile phone, there have been at least two key time nodes in the industry before.
Around the second half of 2020, due to the development of intelligent networked vehicles, the value of mobile phone terminals became increasingly prominent, and geely's mobile phone ambitions began to circulate. But at that time, few people really understood Geely's dedication to making mobile phones, Liang Xi told us,
"At that time, everyone thought that Geely had entered the mobile phone industry in an OEM way, such as the joint products released by BYD and Huawei before... I never thought of building my own company and factory as a way to be asset-heavy. ”
By the middle of 2021, the rumors of Geely's mobile phone building intensified, and finally ushered in the official announcement in September. On September 26, with the establishment of its subsidiary Hubei Xingji Times Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Xingji Times"), Geely officially stepped into the mobile phone industry.
With a registered capital of 80 million yuan, the headquarters is located in Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone, positioning high-end smart phones, with Wang Yong, former vice president of ZTE, as CEO, Li Shufu, chairman of Geely Holding Group, holding 55% of the shares after equity penetration, and Shen Ziyu, CEO of Yijiatong Technology, holding 30% of the shares and serving as a legal person.
Wu Lele, a senior expert in the field of intelligent operating systems, said that although from the perspective of the industry situation, the registered capital of the Xingji era is not a big deal, but Geely's determination to do mobile phones may be enough, "The positioning of high-end smart phones has doomed Geely to not be able to take the OEM route, but to build a talent team, spend time and energy to create differentiated black technology products." ”
It is understood that Geely has previously threatened to invest 10 billion yuan in an attempt to challenge Apple. To achieve this, Geely has accelerated its recruitment efforts in an attempt to attract talent from mainstream mobile phone companies.
For the sake of the car machine, and not only for the car machine
Why does Geely build mobile phones? Li Shufu has answered very clearly - for the sake of the car machine, for the sake of stronger competitiveness of intelligent car products.
The industry has recognized that the combination between smart cars and smart phones is getting closer and closer, but from the perspective of user experience, the separation between the domestic car end and the mobile phone end is still very serious.
Taking the overseas mobile phone market as an example, Apple, as the absolute mainstream, can quickly compatible with car functions, such as the Bluetooth key of the mobile phone that it has launched with BMW.
Look at the domestic. Mobile phone manufacturers are gathered, and the market share is relatively even. Although domestic car companies have been trying to link up with mobile phone manufacturers in recent years, due to the serious differentiation of mobile phone user groups, the mobile phone brands that car companies choose to cooperate with cannot fully reflect the full picture of real car owners, and the process of popularization will be slower.
Moreover, including the bluetooth key of the mobile phone, many smart car functions need to be initiated from the mobile phone side, but the research and development progress of the mobile phone side cannot be controlled by the car company, "after the different mobile phone models can be compatible, for the car company, the leading nature of this new function and the heat of the news have passed." ”
In addition, a major trend in the current industry is that Baidu, Xiaomi, and Huawei are all working hard for the interconnection of car-family-mobile phone scenes.
However, at the software level, whether it is from the application scenario, software complexity, or human-computer interaction experience, smart cars are still the catch-up of smart phones, so that many car owners prefer to install mobile phone brackets in the car rather than use their own car machine system.
Especially now that Xiaomi has entered the car manufacturing industry, many people believe that its software capabilities and insight into user experience will bring dimensionality reduction to the automotive industry.
These situations may give birth to car companies' desire for the right to speak, but also amplify their sense of anxiety -
"Geely makes mobile phones more like defensive logic than offensive logic. New players are menacing, and the future of the whole ecology will definitely be an important point of competition. Liang Xi said.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why the current increase in the mobile phone industry has peaked, but Geely still has to rush into this red sea:
In the future, mobile phones can be used as a benefit for Geely car owners to buy a car. This can at least ensure that when the vehicle is delivered, the function of the linkage between the car and the mobile phone can be used normally and smoothly, ensuring the user experience.
In addition, Geely Automobile plans to sell 570,000 new energy vehicles in 2030. Under the annual ownership of hundreds of thousands, if mobile phones are bundled with vehicles, further converting car owners into mobile phone users, the scale of revenue may be far greater than their cooperation with any mobile phone company.
Not only that, Geely has laid out diversified cutting-edge businesses around automobiles, including power swap modes, aircraft, and artificial satellites. Previously, Geely had revealed that providing high-precision positioning for vehicles through satellites is the primary task, and plans to establish a space group in the future to build a "space-earth integration" three-dimensional travel ecology to provide systematic services for high-level intelligent driving in the future.
Mobile phones may be a key part of Geely's true realization of the "integration of heaven and earth" three-dimensional travel ecology.
If the dust settles on the Geely Meizu acquisition, Meizu's software experience may inject new vitality into Geely - Meizu now has a mature Flyme OS, and has made extensive attempts in smart homes, peripheral accessories, etc., which may further realize the vision of the Internet of Everything, thus feeding back the intelligent and electrification transformation.
Meizu has a complete talent team and a formal mobile phone production process, which is exactly what Geely lacks at present, and it is also a link that Geely mobile phones cannot avoid.
More importantly, unlike mainstream manufacturers such as Xiaomi/OPPO/vivo, Meizu has gradually become niche in recent years. If the price is right, it may be the best choice for Geely.
Of course, the supply chains of mobile phones and automobiles are not the same, but Wu Lele is not worried about Geely's ability in automobile manufacturing and supply chain management.
He believes that even if the professional attributes are not the same, some core suppliers can be shared, such as chips, there are designed for mobile Internet scenes, there are various chips that have been born due to the needs of the Internet of Things, and now they have refined the application of the Internet of Vehicles, "No matter how the architecture changes, basically it is inseparable from the core of arm."
In addition, from the perspective of capital, Geely's mobile phone may also be a hot topic with imagination space.
The road is obstructive and long
It seems that Geely's mobile phone seems to be a smooth and promising road.
However, a closer look will find that whether it is domestic or overseas, there are countless cases of cross-border car manufacturing by mobile phone manufacturers, and very few have entered mobile phones from automobiles. Moreover, when Geely announced the creation of mobile phones, few people paid attention to who the next car company that might make mobile phones was.
"People still don't see clearly the business logic and replicability behind this." Liang Xi said frankly.
As a long-time observer of the automotive industry, he agrees with the view that "smartphone manufacturers can maximize the advantages of their software by making cars", but he does not think that the software team that currently develops car machines (such as Yijiatong) can reverse the launch of a high-quality smartphone. Because the software complexity, depth of security, and grasp of the user experience in cars and mobile phones are two very different dimensions.
Wu Lele was a little surprised by the location of Geely Mobile Phone Company.
Compared with cars, mobile phones are more like FMCG, and FMCG has extremely high requirements for the responsiveness of the supply chain. In this regard, the Pearl River Delta will be more suitable than central China.
Moreover, at present, almost all mainstream mobile phone manufacturers are launching a charge to the high-end market.
The reason why Geely chose the high-end route may be due to the consideration of "the integration of mobile phones and cars", and the audience who can afford to buy a car needs high-end positioning more than a low-end mobile phone. But this also puts it in a bigger challenge, after all, even a more focused mobile phone manufacturer such as OV is difficult to enter the high-end market.
This step of Geely is not too big, waiting for the answer of time.
(Liang Xi and Wu Lele are pseudonyms in the text)
END
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