True wireless headphone products believe that everyone is no stranger, from lv headphones with luxury attributes priced at more than 6,000 yuan to the "model product" AirPods Pro in the TWS industry, and then to all kinds of 100 yuan or so to start TWS, a wide variety of TWS products have built a highly mature market. Whether you really want to listen to a song or want to buy a high-priced "earring", even the strangest needs can find the right product here.
But it's also surprising that the upstream suppliers of the TWS headset market: despite the many brands involved in TWS worldwide, the solution suppliers behind TWS are quite limited, and the chip suppliers behind these solutions are even fewer. According to the TWS market white paper released by I Love Audio Network in 21 years, the main control chip suppliers of mainstream TWS headphones on the market are actually only ten, and no more than two hands can be counted.
Yes, after the rapid development of the TWS market, it is about to embark on the road that the mobile phone film brand has traveled. According to the disclosure of the white paper, the 10 TWS master suppliers can be divided into four categories according to their respective product positioning: their own exclusive, performance priority, cost-effective priority and cost priority.
Special chips for our own products
Among them, their own exclusive representatives are Apple's H1, W1 chips and Huawei's Kirin A1 chips, which usually only appear in these brands' own products, such as Apple's AirPods series and Huawei's FreeBuds 3 using the brand's own chip solution.
In general, in the absence of strong enough technical strength, choosing to use the mature TWS chip solution on the market is a better choice for most brands. After all, direct procurement can pass on the cost and risk of chip research and development, so that headphone brands can catch up with the mainstream technical level of the market in a shorter period of time. In addition, brands can also choose chips that suit their product price points according to their actual needs, thereby reasonably compressing the hardware cost of low-cost TWS headphones.
But for Apple and Huawei, two brands that "master core technology", using self-developed chips is obviously a better choice. Taking Apple H1 as an example, the self-developed chip means that H1 can adapt to Apple's product positioning of headphones to the greatest extent, and the identity of chip, design and software can also maximize the integration of the final product into its own product ecology and create its own exclusive functions.
Finally, thanks to the amazing shipment volume of the head brand, the choice of self-developed chips can spread the research and development costs of chips equally to hundreds of millions of shipments, while the price of terminal products is not subject to the supplier's clamping, and the most complete pricing power can be obtained.
But this "make your own wheels" strategy also has its own shortcomings, that is, these chip products are difficult to develop in the external market. On the one hand, the brand itself does not intend to sell, but on the other hand, the function of the TWS chip needs to cooperate with the hardware and software of the mobile phone to play the maximum use, and the highly bundled strategy is also difficult to open up the market.
Performance is prioritized for high-end
The main chip suppliers that prioritize performance are qualcomm that everyone is familiar with, as well as Hengxuan and Luoda, which may be heard for the first time. Because the brand holds a large number of patents in the wireless field, the headphone master chips of these three brands often represent the best level in the industry without considering the two "closed source" suppliers of Apple and Huawei. In the case of Qualcomm's TWS+ technology, the chip can send two separate streams of data to two headsets alone, providing an AirPods-like experience in a particular Android phone.
Hengxuan and Luoda have chosen another technical route - noise reduction, and in recent years, new TWS products that support noise reduction functions in China have been frequently issued, and these two companies can be said to be indispensable. First of all, the memory space of Hengxuan's BES2300 chip is larger than that of similar chips, which not only comes with a good noise reduction algorithm, but also leaves a larger software operation space for manufacturers, so that the headphones can achieve higher-level software linkage, thereby improving the overall experience of the headphones.
The brand experience of Loda is even more ups and downs: when they first started making TWS chips, the products were also seized by US Customs because they were too similar to the appearance of AirPods. However, in just a few years, with the improvement of brand technology, Loda successfully entered Apple's supply chain with excellent noise reduction algorithms, provided a master control chip for Beats Studio Buds headphones, and completed the transformation from "cottage" to positive. Although there is still a certain distance between its products and Apple's H1 chip, considering that Beats is Apple's first brand for Android users, The "regularized" Luoda is destined to take advantage of Beats' East Wind to go farther and farther.
But for downstream manufacturers in the TWS industry chain, that is, the TWS "brand" as we consumers understand, the use of this high-end TWS chip is not without its drawbacks. First of all, high-end chips mean higher prices, and better prices also limit the brand's profit margins, according to a survey launched by a TWS headset brand, if you leave AirPods and Apple ecology aside, more than half of the remaining TWS product sales occur in the price range of about 200 yuan.
But at the same time, Qualcomm's TWS main control price is generally 1-5 US dollars, and the price of Hengxuan and Luoda products is also around 1-2 US dollars. If calculated according to the ratio of chip cost-price common to TWS headphones, the final product price is likely to exceed 600 yuan, and such pricing obviously cannot help TWS products open up the mass market.
However, from the perspective of mobile phones, considering that the user who buys flagship mobile phones has a relatively large acceptance range of TWS product prices, for some brands with strong "bargaining power" or "premium ability", it is not impossible to use such performance-first chips.
Small profits but high sales or drinking doves to quench thirst?
Seeing this, you may feel that "since high-priced headphones are not well bought, the profitability of chip suppliers that prioritize cost performance or price must be high", but this is not the case. Just now we said that there are many TWS products that occur at a price of about 200 yuan, but if we search for TWS products at this price point on the e-commerce platform, it is not difficult to find that the market competition at this price point is more intense than any price point. Especially for headphones below 100 yuan, the wholesale price of the factory has even been as low as 10 yuan.
Fierce market competition has greatly limited the pricing space of downstream brands, and every chip supplier is similar, so there is no way to distinguish between the functions or software of the headset, just to lose both to compete for the price. When downstream brands begin to actively look for the cheapest suppliers, chip suppliers at the top of the supply chain have to follow along with price reductions, bringing price wars from the product market to the chip market.
This is also the reason why brands such as Zhongke Lanxun and Zhuhai Jieli can compress their chip prices to 2-9 yuan. As a latecomer in the TWS industry, under the premise that the technology accumulation is not as good as Qualcomm, Apple and other brands, the price is their biggest competitiveness, and the price war is also a necessary stage for them to "recuperate" and develop technology.
Taking Zhongke Blue News as an example, this company, founded in 2016 and started with "copycat AirPods", has found a "wealth password" in just two years. In 2018, the revenue was nearly 84 million yuan, and the revenue in 2019 came to 640 million yuan, and the revenue in 2020 was 920 million yuan. At the same time, the net profit also increased from 720,000 yuan in the first 18 years to 210 million yuan. Linked to its product characteristics, it is not difficult to find that for low-cost TWS headphones, the price of the chip is far more important than the function of the chip.
Retrace the path of mobile phone film
But the problem also comes, users can not use about ten yuan TWS headphones for a lifetime, and Zhongke Blue News cannot do a lifetime of low-end new chips. After grasping the market discourse power with low prices, low-cost TWS products will be eliminated by downstream brands and consumers sooner or later. Whether chip manufacturers can seize the opportunity of transformation and use enough technology to complete brand transformation before the low-cost TWS hours, so that the chip can transform from price priority to cost-effective priority, or even performance priority, this is the question that Zhongke Lanxun needs to answer in the future.
From this perspective, TWS is like the screen film of a mobile phone. In the early stage of market development, the only cognition of the user's mobile phone film is the price, material, layer, light transmittance, tailoring these indicators are worthless in the eyes of users. But who won the price war for mobile phone film? Cheaper film? No, it's tempered films that are getting cheaper.
With the decline in the cost of tempered film, the market for traditional film has been greatly impacted, and the strategy of small profits and high sales cannot completely save film manufacturers in the case of obvious gaps in product quality. Brands with technology in the field of coating and cutting have completed the transformation, while those brands that are still immersed in the price war have been completely forgotten by the market.
Obviously, the pattern of the TWS industry is not as severe as the film market, but with the active noise reduction, Bluetooth 5.2 and other technical requirements become the mainstream, the TWS market is destined to retrace the road of mobile phone film. Changes in consumer perception and the impact of next-generation products are also destined to reshuffle the current TWS chip situation. And who can stand firm after the next TWS market change, I believe that only at the "low tide", we can know.