Behind Apple's start to the year with a market value of more than $3 trillion is that it won the top spot in the global and Chinese markets in the fourth quarter of 2021 with the iPhone 13 series. But the Android camp is also trying to launch a counterattack with the underlying technology.
On February 24, OPPO officially commercialized its self-developed Mariana MariSilicon X chip in its high-end flagship Find X5 series, which took 3 years to complete the 6nm process imaging NPU chip, superimposed Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1 main chip, showing OPPO's determination to pry the new experience of imaging with "dual core" and sprint to the high-end market.
On the same day, OPPO's first smart tablet and the acoustic flagship new OPPO Enco X2 true wireless noise-canceling headphones were also released, and since then, OPPO has further expanded its capabilities in the field of intelligent ecology where everything is integrated.
The high-end market is undoubtedly a must for the moment. According to Canalys, the Chinese market will remain the world's largest high-end market in 2022, contributing 30% of the world's product shipments of more than $500. Not long ago, Xiaomi proposed the goal of "winning the first share of domestic high-end mobile phones in three years". Previously, OPPO China President Liu Bo had said that OPPO hoped that in China's high-end market, "there is one in three parts of the world".
As for whether Android manufacturers can really stand in the high-end market, it is actually a race to exchange time for space. This will not only be the accumulation and breakthrough of the underlying technology, but also the determination of manufacturers to invest and the comprehensive consideration of multiple dimensions such as endurance, brand, and ecology.
The starting gun has been fired.
1. Android competes for the first year of high-end competition
The mobile phone market has entered the bottleneck period of development for many years, the replacement cycle has been continuously lengthened, and the manufacturers have been fighting closely, in addition to the folding screen, the Android camp has not seen a high-end mobile phone with outstanding differentiated performance for a long time.
To a certain extent, this has contributed to the background of insufficient demand in the domestic market as a whole. According to IDC statistics, in the whole year of 2021, China's smart phone market showed a rhythm of "high before and low after", with the decline in consumer demand, the terminal flow rate of high-end product lines is less than expected, and shipments continue to decline in the later stage.
Apple is constantly impacting consumer demand in the domestic market. Canalys analyst Toby Zhu believes that the reason why Apple can stand at the peak of its history since entering the Chinese market in the fourth quarter of 2021 is that Apple lowered the price of new product series to stimulate demand for replacement machines, but this also means that the demand in the domestic high-end market is still strong, and the consumption power of this part of the population is relatively unaffected by the external environment.
Wang Xi, research manager at IDC China, said that the level of end-user demand has not shown a significant improvement in the short term. In 2022, from the perspective of the overall market size, it will be a year of continued challenges, but it is also suitable for manufacturers to focus on the improvement of "intrinsic strength" such as technical reserves, product line optimization, and store efficiency operations to meet future opportunities.
The folding screen is a meaningful attempt. As a stepping stone product considered by the industry to be a stepping stone to the high-end market, OPPO released the Find N at the end of December using self-developed Seiko pseudo-vertebral hinges, and launched the industry's leading seamless "hidden trace" effect and multi-angle free hover and other functions. This has brought significant gains to the high-end market in the price segment of 7,000+ yuan.
According to the statistics of the research agency BCI, this helped OPPO set a record for the weekly sales champion of the folding screen category. Although it was only sold for 9 days in December, Find N already accounted for 25% of the folding screen share in the Chinese market that month. According to statistics, 10% of the predetermined users of the product are iPhone 13 Pro Max users, and 40% of the purchasing users come from Apple, indicating that OPPO has impressed a group of high-quality users in the high-end market.
For direct-screen mobile phones, under the guidance of demand, the improvement of imaging capabilities is the core issue that manufacturers must face at this stage. And with the cooperation of mobile phone manufacturers with lens manufacturers, to the continuous dive to the development of independent chip capabilities, and even the integration of software and hardware vertical capabilities, this competition has entered a white-hot stage.
Jiang Bo, senior director of OPPO chip products, once said, "We have realized the synergy of sensor and chip processing through Mariana MariSilicon X, an image-specific NPU, that is, to achieve the deep coupling of OPPO's self-developed algorithm and OPPO's self-developed chip; at the same time, as a terminal manufacturer, it covers the entire image chain from sensor customization to sensor reception processing, and then to the optimization of the image processing chain, so that the algorithm can maximize performance and optimization on the NPU. It is a very deep vertical integration, and I believe that this is also the differentiation ability that OPPO can achieve as a mobile phone terminal manufacturer. ”
He pointed out that the general-purpose chip cannot meet the needs of AI for computing imagery in computing power and energy efficiency, which requires the NPU for self-developed images to maximize the problem of computing power and energy efficiency, which is the reason why OPPO's first self-developed chip chooses the image NPU route. For example, customized sensors sometimes need to cooperate with SoCs, but the R&D cycle of SoCs is long, and the iteration cycle of sensors is very short, which is difficult to balance; and the existing sensor products on the market, if the link optimization and enhanced processing for SoCs, means that the R&D system will be greatly adjusted, and the corresponding cost will be increased.
According to reports, the OPPO Find X5 Pro is equipped with Mariana MariSilicon X, which truly realizes 4K ultra-clear night view video.
Not only that, the OPPO team adopted the DSA "dedicated core" architecture for the neural network core of this chip, and the hardware design was specially designed for the algorithm and effect service of the video AINR, which can provide the equivalent of 18TOPS AI computing power. At the same time, there is also a leading ISP (Image Signal Processing) core within the chip, which specializes in video HDR computing, which can bring up to 20bits of ultra-high dynamic range processing power.
On the whole, with the support of this NPU chip for self-developed imaging, find X5 Pro has powerful AI computing energy efficiency, industry-leading Ultra HDR, lossless real-time RAW computing, and maximized sensor capabilities in terms of imaging. This is a benchmarking combination of capabilities across the industry.
2. The underlying technology race
Why are mobile phone manufacturers increasingly moving towards the underlying technology competition? During the previous 2021 Future Technology Conference, OPPO founder Chen Mingyong had explained.
First, because of user needs, with the continuous upgrading of users' demand for images, oppo, although it has more than ten years of technology accumulation, but to exceed user expectations, it is necessary to provide chip-level research and development to solve the problem.
The second is also the inevitable choice of OPPO's strategy, "We believe that in the era of mutual integration of all things, technology companies must solve key problems through key technologies, and if there is no underlying core technology, there can be no future; the flagship product without the core underlying technology is a castle in the air." At the same time, he said that OPPO will continue to invest resources, use a team of thousands of people, do self-developed chips in a down-to-earth manner, no matter how many challenges ahead, persevere, and insist that Qingshan will not relax.
In fact, the so-called mobile phone innovation is scarce, to a large extent, because innovation is becoming increasingly difficult. At present, the core use pain points are actually more unsolved problems, so to enter the deep water area of technology or even no man's land to explore, self-research, especially self-developed chips is the only way.
It should be noted that OPPO's self-developed chip is a 6nm process, and there are currently only 4 manufacturers in the country that can design and mass-produce commercial 6nm chips, namely Huawei HiSilicon, OPPO, MediaTek and Ali. There are other manufacturers that have announced that mass production is coming, but they have not really launched commercial products.
Terminal manufacturers have natural advantages in the process of product definition and commercial verification based on user insights, and the combination of these two capabilities will better bring about the improvement of domestic high-process chip design capabilities and the maturity of related industrial ecology.
On the whole, OPPO has long paid attention to the importance of independent research and development capabilities. According to data released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva on February 10, 2021, mainland PCT international patent applications once again ranked first in the world, and OPPO ranked sixth in the world with 2,208 PCT international patent applications, an increase of two places compared with 2020. This is also the third year that OPPO has been ranked in the top ten of the PCT International Patent Global Applicant Rankings.
In 2021, a total of three Chinese companies entered the top 10 of the global PCT international patent applicant rankings, namely Huawei, OPPO and BOE, which is also the third consecutive year that OPPO ranks second among Chinese companies.
Behind this lies the "Trinity" research and development system it has built, as well as the accumulated R&D team of more than 10,000 people. During the aforementioned Future Science and Technology Conference, Liu Chang, vice president of OPPO and president of the research institute, introduced that in the past three years, OPPO has not only continuously invested a lot of resources in research and development, but also formed a research and development system of "engineering technology organization + advanced research organization + basic technology organization".
Among them, the most important task of the engineering and technical organization is to efficiently and accurately transform technology into products and services, and accelerate the application and innovation of existing technologies in life scenarios; the first research organization is based on two assumptions to explore the direction of future technology investment, one is how to make the existing technology or business better and more extreme, and the other is how to produce disruptive technology and bring new business; the core ability of the basic technology organization is the chip, on the mobile phone track of the long slope thick snow, OPPO believes that the technical basis of the subversive is the chip.
According to reports, OPPO has established cooperation with more than 40 scientific research units and academic organizations around the world, and promoted the commercial landing of products. For example, in the new product Find X5 series, the new material heat dissipation mobile phone case was cooperated with Wuhan University, and the motor vibration perception was jointly improved with Hunan University, so that the academic achievements of the laboratory went out of the campus.
Through these vertical integrations covering software, hardware, chips and other capabilities, OPPO has gradually built its own moat, hoping to gradually move towards ecological technology companies and gradually win the high-end mobile phone market.
"Five years have passed since Huawei went to the high-end market with the Mate10 series. The high-end market is bound to be a long-term accumulation process, which is not only in the brand image, so that consumers are willing to believe in your premium ability, but also the product does have a good experience, which requires long-term optimization and run-in. Counterpoint analyst Zhang Qi told the author that even Apple has stood firm in the high-end market since the early iPhone 3Gs, and has experienced more than a decade, through continuous iteration and optimization, interspersed with mistakes and re-planning to get to today. This is ultimately a process that requires in-depth research and long-term refueling.
Although other domestic brands have not yet seen outstanding results, but through the folding screen and other product matrix that tests the comprehensive research and development strength, the market performance has explained everything. In this continuous market race, if you can have the systematic ability to grasp the strategic control point and continue to go deep into the market, you may be the first to grasp the key to achieving certain results.