The article produced by Radar Finance | Zhang Kaijing edited | the deep sea
Recently, the heat of folding screen mobile phones has been very popular.
During the Spring Festival, folding screen mobile phones also appeared in a situation of "one machine is difficult to find", and some consumers ran through many stores of multiple brands and failed to buy spot. In the secondary market, a variety of folding screen mobile phones have been speculated at a premium of 500-1000 yuan.
Mobile phone manufacturers are also competing to increase the number. Following OPPO, Huawei, and Honor have successively put on the shelves of new folding screen mobile phones, Vivo, Apple, and Google have also been rumored to enter the folding screen market.
It is worth noting that oppo has just obtained a folding screen mobile phone appearance patent authorization picture shows that the product may be foldable twice.
"Folding once is not enough, but also folding twice, is the folding screen already so rolled?" Some netizens sighed. In the eyes of some industry insiders, a competition on smartphone folding screen technology has quietly arrived.
However, Radar Finance noted that folding screen mobile phones have been available for three and a half years since their launch, but their market share is only negligible compared with the smart phone market, and the industry currently recognizes that there are still many difficulties in the production side.
At the moment when smart phones are caught in stock competition, the folding screen is a weapon for domestic mobile phones to conquer the high-end market? Or is it just another bubble that's been blown up?
Unbought folding machine
"The best wealth management product of the year is online!" This is the first reaction of netizens after Huawei launched a new generation of folding screen flagship MateX2 a year ago.
Why does a phone get such a review? Public information shows that the official price of the 256GB and 512GB versions of Huawei MateX2 is 17999 yuan and 18999 yuan respectively, but two days before its sale, the same product on idle fish has been sold to 35,000 yuan, and it is 1,000 yuan to grab on behalf of others, and some netizens say that the dealers around them bid 40,000-50,000 yuan for purchase.
The reason for this is that supply outstrips demand is the key. Although Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer business, has said that the company is increasing production capacity every month and hoping that consumers can buy mobile phones at affordable prices, this sentence is only a beautiful vision at best. "I already have three Huawei dealers around me who have started selling millet, and there is no way to do anything about it." At that time, some Weibo netizens sighed.
If Huawei's high price in the secondary market can be explained by the impact of the US government ban, then the similar plot staged today a year later illustrates the instability of the overall supply of domestic folding screens to a certain extent.
On December 15, 2021, December 23, and January 10, 2022, OPPO Find N, Huawei P50 Pocket, and Honor Magic V three folding screen mobile phones were released in less than a month, of which the price of OPPO Find N has dropped to 7699 yuan. But consumers soon discovered that it was just as hard to buy a phone.
During the Spring Festival, a reporter visited a number of shopping centers in Shenzhen and found that whether it is Huawei, Glory or OPPO, offline stores do not have the latest folding screen mobile phone spot, and on Taobao, Jingdong flagship stores, related products also need to be booked to rush to buy, want to buy, but also have to fight for speed.
It is worth mentioning that in order to limit the time limit, Taobao and Jingdong malls, if you want to book Honor Magic V, you must first open 88vip and Jingdong Plus members, and the last appointment of the two platforms has been scheduled for February 15.
In this context, there are already scalpers smelling business opportunities. When the Glory Magic V was just released, the offer of 256G bright black (original price of 9999 yuan) has been speculated to 11399 yuan, 12906 yuan, 13888 yuan, and the hottest Magic V 512G bright black (original price of 10999 yuan) has been speculated to more than 15000 yuan.
A mobile phone secondary market quotation obtained by Radar Finance shows that as of February 8, the different styles of Honor Magic V still have a premium of 1400-1500 yuan, and the OPPO Find V premium is 50-450 yuan.
In the e-commerce platform, there are still sellers selling the above three folding screen mobile phones at prices ranging from 500-4000 yuan above the original price.
In this regard, some insiders said that the hot market of the market on the one hand is related to the enthusiasm of consumers to taste the early adopters after the price of folding screen mobile phones has declined; on the other hand, the industrial chain is still in the stage of testing demand, and the shipment volume cannot be expanded rapidly. At present, offline mobile phone sales stores, folding screen mobile phones are supplied in single digits every week.
Smartphone manufacturers blow up the "folding wind"
On the other side of consumers' hard-to-find opportunities, big manufacturers are also competing for folding screen cakes.
During the Spring Festival, OPPO Guangdong Mobile Communications Co., Ltd. obtained authorization for the appearance of a "folding screen mobile phone". It is worth noting that the patented pictures show that the product is suspected of containing two folding hinges, or can be folded twice.
On February 7, according to foreign media reports, Google may launch a folding screen mobile phone with the name of "Pixel Fold" or "Pixel Notepad" this year, and equipped the phone with the new operating system "Android 12L" launched by Google in 2021. However, the news has not been officially confirmed.
On February 8, vivo, which was previously reported to be about to launch a folding screen mobile phone in 2022, also came with the latest trend.
According to the configuration information revealed by the well-known exposure blogger @ digital small talk station, the outer screen of a certain folding engineering machine adopts a single hole micro-curved design, which is a normal proportion, the right half of the inner screen is centered on the single hole, supports QHD resolution, the proportion is close to square, and the inner and outer screens are 120Hz adaptive high brushes.
Judging from the comment interaction, this phone may be Vivo's upcoming folding screen flagship NEX Fold. Previously, vivo has applied for trademarks for "NEX Fold", "NEX Slide" and "NEX Roll".
If the above reports are true, Google and vivo will become two more heavyweight players in the folding screen mobile phone market after Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, OnePlus and Honor.
"The prerequisites for the folding screen to enter the era of the main machine have matured." Zhao Ming, CEO of Honor Terminal Co., Ltd., said in an interview, "What we want to tell the entire industry and consumers is that the folding screen is no longer a product that tests the water, it can be used as the flagship mobile phone of the main force, and the future of the straight board mobile phone and the folding screen mobile phone will be long-term coexistence and parallel development." ”
However, in the view of some insiders, domestic mobile phone brands are crowded into the folding screen market, in addition to the development of technical conditions, there are other considerations.
One of the most mainstream views is that domestic mobile phones have always been the main low-end market, and brands hope to explore the possibility of high-end mobile phone market through the high requirements of high prices and technical research and development capabilities through folding screens.
After all, no one wants Apple to dominate the high-end market, not to mention that Apple's latest release of the iPhone 13 price has dropped to 5,000 yuan, causing a lot of shock to the mid-range mobile phone market.
Market research agencies IDC and Counterpoint data show that in the fourth quarter of 2021, Apple's market share in the domestic market reached an all-time high, more than 20%. According to CINNO Research data, in November 2021, Apple accounted for 85.6% of the sales of models with more than 5,000 yuan in the Chinese mainland market, Huawei accounted for 7.9%, and other brands accounted for 6.5% in total.
On the evening of February 8, Lei Jun, chairman of Xiaomi, said on his personal Weibo, "Starting from today, Xiaomi Group officially set up a high-end strategy working group, and under the traction of the world's first strategy of mobile phone sales in three years, it clearly defined the strategic goal of high-end: products and experiences should be fully benchmarked against the iPhone, and the market share of domestic high-end mobile phones should be won first in three years." ”
And the current development of smart phones has also reached a bottleneck period. IDC reports that global smartphone shipments fell 3.2% year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2021. While global smartphone shipments are still up 5.7% year-over-year from a full-year perspective, this was achieved on a low base in 2020. In terms of absolute data values, the shipment of 1.355 billion units in 2021 is less than the 1.371 billion units in 2019.
Stock competition, intensified internal rolls, Apple has come out of the news that it may launch a folding screen mobile phone in 2023. In this case, such technological innovation is likely to be the key to mobile phone manufacturers to gain a greater advantage in the competition.
Since its appearance, it has stumbled all the way
However, folding screen is not an easy breakthrough technology, and since it officially appeared in the consumer market in 2018, it has been questioned due to issues such as use and purchase experience.
In October 2018, Royole Technology released the world's first consumer-grade folding screen mobile phone FlexPai, priced at 8999 yuan. However, the fuselage is too heavy, the screen is fragile, easy to produce creases and other defects, so that this mobile phone has become a "pseudo-demand for technology for the sake of technology" by netizens, and it has not provoked much splash in the market.
The following year, Huawei and Samsung have entered the game, and at that time, some brokers believed that 2019 was expected to become the first year of the collapse screen outbreak. But it turned out to be a misjudgment.
When the Galaxy Fold, the first folding screen mobile phone released by Samsung, was first introduced, it had hard injuries in the screen, hinge, system, etc., and was re-listed after upgrading in the same year, but the fragile screen, creases, excessive weight, and immature system ecology were still frequently criticized by users.
Huawei's folding screen mobile phone, although relying on the appearance of full of technology and complex technology, showed a muscle while being sanctioned by the United States, but since then it has been difficult to mass-produce due to many problems at the production end. Today, it leaves the impression on many consumers only as "rich people's toys" and the sky-high price of up to 80,000 yuan.
The data shows that in the third quarter of 2021, the shipment of global folding screen mobile phones increased by 215% month-on-month and 480% year-on-year, and only 2.6 million units, accounting for less than 1% of the total shipment of 326 million smartphones in the quarter.
It is worth mentioning that looking back at the folding screen mobile phones in the previous market, the secondary market price of the Xiaomi MIX FOLD has been cut compared to the time of issuance, and the price of Huawei's Mate X2 has also fallen by 500-2700 yuan compared with the time of issuance.
Folding screen mobile phone manufacturing, where is the difficulty?
The slow progress of folding screens in the market is related to their unique manufacturing process.
The current folding screen type can be divided into four types: inner folding, outer folding, up and down folding and folding three folds, each of which has no small use problem. The core difficulty lies in the flexible screen itself, hinge technology and adaptation.
Although the flexible screen can be bent and folded, long-term bending will cause irreversible damage to it, affecting the service life of the product.
According to the analysis of industry insiders, although the flexible screen is very thin, it also contains polarizers, covers, films, OCA glue and other multi-layer structures, in order to achieve excellent foldable function, it is necessary to reduce the thickness of the screen module as much as possible on the basis of increasing the strength of each layer structure. The increase in the strength of each layer of structure has extremely high technical requirements, which further limits the number of manufacturers who can produce related materials on a large scale.
In addition, how to make the hinge durable is also a difficult problem, although many laptops also widely use this technology when connecting the screen and the host computer, but the opening and closing frequency of the computer is not the same as that of the mobile phone.
On this basis, the cost of folding screen mobile phones remains high. According to a report previously released by Guosheng Securities, the component cost of Samsung's foldable screen mobile phone is about 65% higher than that of the iPhone XS, and its cost increase is mainly for screen modules and hinged components. Liu Zuohu, founder and CEO of OnePlus, once revealed that the hinge on OPPO Find N alone costs as much as $100.
Huawei's external folding scheme, although it can transfer the extrusion force to the hinge structure through the gear, this scheme requires a more accurate hinge to give enough support to the screen, and the cost is directly 8 times higher than that of the original.
At the same time, the production yield of OLED screens will continue to decline with the process from straight screen to curved screen to folding screen, which also brings great difficulty to related manufacturers to reduce costs.
In addition to the hardware, in the switching of dual-screen devices and single-screen devices, the adaptation of software is also quite cumbersome, and mobile phone manufacturers also need to equip folding screens with corresponding software ecology.
The superposition of multiple factors invisibly extends the research and development time of folding screen mobile phones. Taking OPPO as an example, the first generation of Find N prototype was born long before Royole Technology pushed the folding screen to the market, but in order to reduce it to the threshold of "commonly used" machines, the team experienced four years and six generations of research and development. In order to adapt each part of the components, even if a better chip or a higher capacity battery appears on the market in the late stage of research and development, it cannot be replaced at will.
Another example is that in early 2021, the market had news that Apple had asked Samsung and New Nikko to send samples of foldable screens, requiring screens to reach a folding life of 1 million times in tests. This means that if a consumer opens and closes the phone 200 times a day, the phone can be used for 13 years. Usually, the number of times the average person touches the machine is even less than 200 times a day. Until the yield-compliant screen is built, Apple will continue to dormant...
In fact, due to the difficulty of the folding screen production process, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have been more dependent on overseas companies in the supply chain.
CITIC Construction Investment believes that the key technical points and value increments in the folding screen mobile phone industry chain are mainly flexible OLED, UTG glass protective cover, hinge and hinge.
Among them, in the hinge and hinge design of the folding screen, most of the domestic manufacturers still rely on foreign companies such as Annuo Electronics, while in terms of flexible OLED panels and UTT glass protection covers, Samsung has almost formed a monopoly in the global market.
It is understood that the foldable cover material is mainly divided into transparent polyimide CPI and ultra-thin glass UTT two, Samsung as the earliest manufacturer to use UTT, can be described as driving the industry cover material from CPI to UTT transformation. Some industry chain sources revealed that at present, whether it is OPPO or vivo, Xiaomi, it will use the UTT glass protection cover scheme provided by Samsung on the folding screen products.
Although the mainland's BOE, Changxin Technology and other companies are also accelerating to catch up, Huawei Mate X and Mate xs use folding screens are exclusively supplied by BOE, but as far as the overall industrial chain is concerned, there is still a big gap between domestic companies and the global leading level.
Note: This article is the original of Radar Finance (ID: leidacj). Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.