Text/JING Audit/Zi Yang Correction/Zhi Qiu
In 2016, Apple removed the 3.5mm headphone port for the iPhone 7, leading the TWS headphone boom.
IDC data shows that from 2017 to 2021, TWS headphone market shipments have been growing rapidly. TWS headphone shipments are expected to reach 372 million pairs by 2025. The rapid growth of the TWS headset market has become an opportunity for the development of many industrial chain enterprises.
In this context, China's semiconductor industry chain has run out of a dark horse - Zhongke Blue News. According to the latest news, Zhongke Blue News has already held a meeting on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, and the listing is just around the corner.
Zhongke Blue News was born in Huaqiang North, China Electronics, and is known as an industry hidden champion hidden in the counter of Huaqiang North. Although the popularity is not high, it can be seen through the prospectus that the headphone chips produced by Zhongke Lanxun have achieved high-end coverage of the market.
From 2018 to 2020, Zhongke Lanxun sold a total of 1.5 billion TWS chips. SMIC is its number one supplier, and SMIC is also a shareholder behind SMIC Blueflood. SMIC blue news can have today's results, SMIC is indispensable.
Zhongke Blue News Company was not established for a long time, and it has only been five years. However, the market share of the company's products is not low, reaching 25% in 2019 and 36% in 2020. There are two main reasons for growing so quickly:
First, Huang Zhiqiang, the founder of Zhongke Blue News, pulled Liu Zhizhan, a veteran of integrated circuits, to start a business together. The latter is a veteran figure in the field of audio chip design in Hong Kong. With the help of Liu Shuzhan, Zhongke Lanxun quickly set up its R&D team and established its own technical barriers.
It is reported that in the company's initial equity allocation, Liu's technical team accounted for up to 40% of the shares, and its importance to Zhongke Blue News can be seen.
Second, Zhongke Blue News found the right market positioning, and the current TWS headphone chip can be divided into three echelons: high-end, mid-end and low-end. Among them, the low-end chip market is much higher than that of high-end chips and mid-end chips, and Zhongke Lanxun dominates the low-end chip market. It is worth mentioning that although Zhongke Blue News is positioned at the low end, it does not ignore research and development and does not pay attention to core technology development.
Zhongke Lanxun's revenue can repeatedly reach new highs, and its market share continues to grow, which is very important because Zhongke Lanxun has successfully developed AB535 and AB537X series chips to solve the problem of Bluetooth transmission out of sync.
And on this basis, Zhongke Lanxun has successfully improved the reaction speed of the host by continuously optimizing the product, and the product has thus obtained positive feedback from the market and customers.
Of course, in terms of hard power, there is still a big gap between Zhongke Lanxun products and giant enterprise products.
The technology of Zhongke Lanxun can only allow its products to occupy a leading position in the low-end market, and the current TWS headset market pattern is dumbbell-shaped, and the low-end and high-end accounts for a large proportion.
In this context, leading technology companies and companies with cost-effective products will enjoy the greatest development dividends. Zhongke Blue News belongs to the latter, and most of the dividends of the expansion of the low-end TWS headset market have been pocketed by the company.
So, can this model survive for a long time?
In my opinion, the answer is yes.
With the continuous advancement of technology, the experience of low-end TWS headsets will gradually improve, and the number of users who choose low-end TWS headsets will only increase. The biggest threat of Zhongke Lanxun is from competitors, low-end TWS headphone chips have a low entry threshold, and with the expansion of the market in the future, there will inevitably be new manufacturers to divide the share of Zhongke Lanxun.
Zhongke Lanxun wants to keep the status of a brother in the low-end TWS headphone chip, and there are only two ways to go, one is to upgrade technology, and the other is to reduce costs.
Liu's technical team has the ability to continuously optimize the product, and at the same time, the price of Zhongke Lanxun chips also has a lot of room to fall. After all, The Zhongke Lanxun chip chose the RISC-V architecture. Compared with peers, one less IP expenditure fee, lower cost.
On the whole, in the low-end TWS headset market, the competitiveness of Zhongke Blue News will not only not decrease, but also may become stronger.