Or is it the original recipe, or the familiar flavor that MWC is back?
Yesterday evening, Honor Mobile announced that the new generation of flagship Honor Magic4 series will be released at 8:00 p.m. Beijing time on February 28 at the MWC Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
In addition to the official announcement of the new machine release, the fact that Honor released the new machine at the MWC Barcelona exhibition site is worth paying attention to in itself. This should be the first time that Chinese mobile phone manufacturers have returned to Barcelona and released new machines after the cancellation of the MWC Barcelona offline exhibition in 2020.
It's not easy.
The outbreak of the epidemic in 2020 has just begun, and due to fears of the spread of the epidemic and the announcement of the withdrawal of many companies, Barcelona finally cancelled the MWC exhibition in 2020. After 33 consecutive years of conferences, many industries, including mobile phones, have experienced a long period of market haze since then because the new crown epidemic was cancelled for the first time.
In 2021, MWC Barcelona also experienced the danger of postponement and near cancellation, although the offline exhibition was finally held in June, nokia, Samsung, Google and other companies did not participate in the offline exhibition, and the scale of participants was only about 30,000 people, less than 1/3 of 2019.
Fortunately, this year's MWC has been determined to be officially launched on February 28, in addition to the official announcement of the new machine, Huawei, Samsung, OPPO, vivo, xiaomi, Lenovo, TCL, Qualcomm, MediaTek and other manufacturers have determined that they will set up the exhibition on the spot. Among them, Vivo's first folding screen mobile phone, OPPO Find X5 series, Samsung Galaxy S22 series andFOLD series are expected to be unveiled at this MWC.
GSMA President Mats Granryd said in an earlier interview that he expected the number of MWC Barcelona exhibitors in 2022 to be close to pre-COVID-19 levels. Mats Granryd said about 1,000 speakers and 1,500 exhibitors signed up for the show this year and came to the event. All the indicators indicate that this will be a great show. At the same time, the GSMA will continue to conduct its events in a "responsible and safe manner".
The collective return of Chinese manufacturers will undoubtedly help the prestige of MWC exhibitions to return to before the epidemic, knowing that Chinese manufacturers accounted for 18% of MWC before.
The MWC exhibiting in Barcelona is undoubtedly a great opportunity for Chinese manufacturers to appear in the world. Meanwhile, according to Counterpoint's latest report, Smartphone shipments in China fell 11% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2021, with Apple ranking first and reaching its highest market share ever.
The decline in overall shipments and the strength of Apple indicate that domestic manufacturers will not only seek expansion in the global high-end market, but also become more fierce.
The battle for the high-end market is not limited to the Chinese market. Including Honor, vivo, OPPO and Xiaomi, they are accelerating the introduction of their high-end products to the global stage. The Western European market has a large number of high-end smartphone user groups, and the region will become a key overseas market for these manufacturers to lay out high-end products. Success in the Western European market has also helped Chinese mobile phone brand manufacturers to enhance their brand image.
It is foreseeable that mobile phone manufacturers are very likely to stage a new technology and new product competition in the upcoming MWC exhibition, and this is just the beginning, the curtain of this global high-end market battle drama is slowly rising, we wait and see!