Text | Moment Business, author | Xiaoyang, Editor | Zhou Ye
In 2022, the game phone that has been sung as "hopeless" is still hot.
At the beginning of January, OnePlus 10 Pro, realme true self GT2 series, Aiku IQOO9 series have been listed, all with e-sports experience as one of the main selling points; on February 7, the first day of the new year, OnePlus announced its entry into the game mobile phone market, and its head of China Li Jie mentioned in an internal letter that in the new year, OnePlus shifted from the previous performance flagship + image to the performance flagship + game.
On February 16, Xiaomi's Redmi brand released the K50 e-sports version; within a week, Nubia launched a new game phone Red Devil 7 series; the long-warmed Black Shark 4 series was also officially released; Lenovo announced that it would start selling the Savior Y90 e-sports mobile phone on March 10, continuing to start the battle for game phones.
At a time when the domestic mobile phone market is monopolized by mainstream brands such as Huami OV, small and medium-sized mobile phone manufacturers are not only difficult to overtake in curves, but even survival has become difficult.
Gaming phones are a new change that has emerged in recent years. The domestic e-sports industry continues to be hot, the mobile game market has also maintained rapid growth, and the surge in mobile game users is considered to need a professional-grade game phone.
Lenovo launched the Savior series of mobile phones, which is in the context of the main brand is difficult to break through, hoping to rely on market segments to fight a way out. With similar ideas, there are asus ROG, Nubian Red Devils and so on.
But since 2018, the game phone market has been crowded with mainstream brands, small and medium-sized manufacturers, and over the years, they have achieved little. Gaming phones are increasingly considered a narrow market, and eventually whether more sales can explode here and whether they can save the brands that have fallen behind must be marked with question marks.
For Lenovo, after years of accumulation on the PC side, the game market is not unfamiliar with the Lenovo brand. Turning to the game market, Lenovo has launched two e-sports mobile phones from 2020, the Savior 2 Pro and the Savior Y90. Lenovo, which missed many opportunities in the domestic mobile phone market, is still late this time.
In the past decade, Lenovo mobile phones have experienced a process from falling from the peak to trying to make a comeback, and then turning over again and again to the end of failure.
With the gradual intensification of competition in the domestic mobile phone market and the intensification of the Matthew effect, how much time and opportunities are left for Lenovo mobile phones?
01 Can the game phone still "play"?
Game phones have been a failure experience that many head mobile phone manufacturers are reluctant to mention.
In 2003, the prospects of the mobile game market were prominent, and it also became the focus of mobile phone manufacturers to invest heavily in research and development and marketing.
In the same year, Nokia invested nearly $200 million in the development and advertising of game phones, but in the end, this high-priced N-gage mobile phone, which mainly targets young users, sold poorly, and the price fell again and again, and even became a "one-dollar mobile phone". But nokia, after this fiasco, decided to relaunch a new gaming phone in 2007.
Nokia in the gaming phone market at the same time as the fiasco, Samsung also launched the SCH-B550 in the same period, LG built the KV3600, in 2009 Soai also launched the PSP gaming mobile phone. They worked hard to make the game more like a gamepad, but they still didn't make much of a splash.
At that time, gaming mobile phones were not enough to become a trend that led the times, and even mobile phone giants could not escape the result of failure.
So, more than a decade later, when major manufacturers start to build a mobile phone for games, can this temptation succeed?
Since 2018, Nubia's Red Devils, Asus' ROG, Xiaomi's Black Shark Technology have entered the game first, and e-sports equipment hardware manufacturer Razer has announced its official entry into the mobile phone field, and in the next two years, mainstream brands such as iQOO, OPPO, and Xiaomi's Redmi have also launched game phones.
In 2020, Lenovo launched the rescuer series - Lenovo's first e-sports mobile phone before a few mainstream mobile phone manufacturers, named from a classic notebook of Lenovo, which can be seen that Lenovo has high hopes and seems to hope to achieve the resurrection of the mobile phone business in the e-sports market.
Lenovo Savior Y90 Esports phone, photo/Lenovo official website
This is also the attempt of many niche mobile phones, in the mobile phone market by the four giants of Huami OV dominated by the pattern, the less existential brand needs to find more segmented, more empty areas.
Gaming phones are indeed a more niche area, but it's packed with competitors. Moreover, game phones are hot again, all relying on the popularity of major mobile phone manufacturers, not user-oriented.
Although the game market, especially mobile game users, are rising, compared with the former users who are accustomed to being a "white prostitute party", the current generation of young users are more willing to pay for games, and the ability to pay is higher.
Do huge mobile game users also need a mobile phone that specializes in playing games? The results may not be promising.
Lu Weibing once mentioned in an interview that Xiaomi has never given up the study and observation of the game category, but in 2020, China will also sell 1.6 million to 1.7 million units, "just such a plate."
By 2021, the mobile game market continues to explode, but the sales and market performance of game phones are still not good. According to the data released by Redmi, the sales of The Redmi K40 listed in early 2021 exceeded 10 million units, compared with the Redmi K40 Game Enhanced Edition, which sold more than 600,000 units in the official flagship store. The sales of other top-ranked game phones in the Jingdong flagship store have not exceeded 100,000 units.
The scale of game phones does not go up, but also led to the cost of mobile phone manufacturers can not be low, before the price of many game phones have exceeded the price of many high-end flagship machines, which also raises the user's choice threshold.
What is highly questioned is that the configuration of the game phone is similar to many high-end flagship machines, but it is more inclined to the esports theme in terms of design and marketing. In contrast, flagship machines can accommodate gamers and attract a wider range of ordinary players.
This also means that in the limited market of gaming phones, players will face more fierce competition.
Lenovo has also tried many ways. Previously, the price of the Savior 2 Pro (8GB+64GB) was 3499 yuan, which was not only lower than the price of other similar e-sports mobile phones, but even lower than some mobile phones equipped with Snapdragon 865 in the previous generation.
Compared with making money and making profits, rescuers are eager to let more people use Lenovo's mobile phones.
In order to differentiate, Lenovo has carried out an innovative design of the game phone . The Savior 2 Pro has also designed the phone as an obvious "three-stage" shape, similar to the shape of the gamepad from the back; the lifting front camera is located on the right side of the phone, designed for the game host group; the left side of the phone is also set up with a charging port, hoping to improve the charging experience during the game.
But what makes the Savior 2 Pro the most out of the circle is that in April 2021, a video of the Savior 2 Pro being broken by a foreigner was circulated in China.
After that, more similar videos began to be uploaded to the website. Among them, the B station UP main new review technology also carried out the same test, in the video, an ordinary adult male, also broke the savior 2 Pro with his bare hands, the video reached more than 4 million views, the bullet screen "the whole process is effortless", "just like breaking the pill" and other comments, so that the Lenovo savior into a greater negative controversy.
The cost performance did not win more users for Lenovo, but the quality of the product was controversial.
Photo/ Search for Rescuer 2 Pro on video site
Recently, Lenovo has launched the savior Y90, the name inspiration is still from the Lenovo notebook savior Y9000, this phone will be on sale on March 10, equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1 processor, equipped with 18GB of LPDDR 5 running memory and 640GB of UFS 3.1 ultra-fast flash memory, from all aspects is currently the top design.
It seems that Lenovo has changed its thinking this time, hoping to create the strongest game phone that gamers can buy.
However, compared with the idea of Lenovo's dead top with game phones, today's major mobile phone manufacturers are not moving closer to the performance of the game, but have adopted a casual attitude to seek a wider range of users.
For example, Feng Yufei, president of the iQOO brand, once made a surprising statement, saying that iQOO should do an e-sports-level experience, not a game phone or an e-sports mobile phone.
The wind of the game phone has blown, but whether it is the real wind outlet or the "false proposition" is still unknown. The routes taken by major manufacturers are also different and controversial.
Lenovo, which chooses to enter the game, is more like an adventure, it wants to fight a way to survive, but the game phone is ultimately a very risky choice.
02 Lenovo mobile phones are losing ground
Lenovo, which has caught up with the gaming phone outlet, has missed too many opportunities in the past.
Nearly a decade has passed since the glorious period of Lenovo's mobile phone business, and the former giants who do not accept defeat have been trying to reverse the decline, but at the same time that they have riveted enough to transform and innovate, the momentum of shrinking mobile phone business is also intensifying.
In 2008, Lenovo spent 200 million yuan to announce its entry into the smartphone business. The brand and channel advantages brought by the PC business made Lenovo mobile phones quickly go to the head. In the era of operators, the timely use of the machine sea strategy to seize the operator channels has once again consolidated Lenovo's position.
2014 was a turning point, the termination of operator subsidies, opened the curtain of another channel change in the mobile phone market, Lenovo is busy, but surprisingly, it did not grab much dividend in the end.
According to TrendForce data, in 2014, Lenovo mobile phones (including Motorola) also ranked third in the world, but in 2015, Lenovo's mobile phone business stagnated, user loss was serious, and market share fell again and again.
On the other hand, Xiaomi's online e-commerce channels continued to grow until the outbreak, Huawei Glory quickly kept up, OPPO and vivo occupied offline channels, and Lenovo was almost non-grained in the channel reform, and the machine sea strategy of the operator era also had side effects on product quality and brand image, resulting in the road of high-quality products becoming more and more difficult to go.
Although there were already signs of going downhill at that time, no one expected lenovo to continue to decline.
Summarizing the year 2015, Yang Yuanqingsheng, chairman and CEO of Lenovo Group, said that attaching importance to emerging markets outside Of China has made Lenovo mobile phones grow particularly fast in these markets. "Then this momentum, Lenovo mobile phones will also make a breakthrough in mature markets, especially in China to fight a turnaround battle."
The following year, in a dinner party gathering Lei Jun, Yu Chengdong and others, Yang Yuanqing even made a beautiful imagination of "working with Huawei and Xiaomi to achieve the world's top 3 smartphones, first crossing Apple and Samsung, and then competing for high and low".
At that time, Lenovo's mobile phone achievements overseas proved that its product strength was still passed, but in the domestic market, Lenovo missed the opportunity and missed the opportunity to make a comeback, which also caused a situation that has been lagging behind and difficult to surpass.
Yang Yuanqing, Chairman and CEO of Lenovo Group, Photo/Yang Yuanqing Weibo
In this channel change that has lasted for several years, in Yang Yuanqing's optimistic planning, what is Lenovo busy with?
In the four years after 2013, the top management of Lenovo mobile phones changed frequently, resulting in the implementation of Lenovo's strategy being blocked. In fact, lenovo is still changing coaches, from Liu Jun, Chen Xudong, Qiao Jian to Changcheng, lenovo has replaced four heads of mobile phone business in China within three years.
In 2014, Lenovo spent $2.9 billion to acquire the declining Motorola mobile phone business, a major acquisition that allowed Lenovo to enter overseas markets and divide two product lines, high-end and cost-effective.
However, these contributions to the domestic mobile phone business are few, the increase in product lines has not formed a brand synergy, and the integration after the acquisition has also consumed Lenovo's time and energy.
In the period when Lenovo mobile phones sold the best, there were fewer product promotions and promotions, and brand building failed to keep up, which also made it miss the opportunity to enhance brand competitiveness.
After that, Lenovo's mobile phone business has gradually been marginalized.
03 There is no Lenovo mobile phone location in the domestic market
Despite this, Lenovo still did not give up the mobile phone business.
Lenovo's most recent reform of the mobile phone business began in 2018, and Yang Yuanqing decided to lead Lenovo to start the "four major battles". Lenovo's mobile department has been reorganized, and it has begun to play a people-friendly price strategy, and even launched many "hundred yuan machines".
Under the leadership of Chang Cheng, Lenovo once again implemented the jihai strategy, launching 10 mobile phones in only one year, and successively "touching porcelain" xiaomi, OPPP, vivo, glory and other mobile phone brands in marketing promotion.
The battle still ended in defeat. Sun Yanbiao, president of the First Mobile Phone Industry Research Institute, once estimated that in addition to motorola models, the monthly sales of Lenovo mobile phones in 2018 did not exceed 100,000 units, and the annual sales volume was about 1 million units. According to this estimate, Lenovo's market share in China is less than 0.3%.
In 2019, Huawei was affected by the US ban, and mobile phone sales fell significantly, making room for competitors. In addition, the concept of folding screen is also gradually popular, Lenovo announced that it will resurrect Motorola Razr V3 with folding screen technology, playing the emotional card, but throughout 2019, in order to seize huawei's vacated market, the price war in the mobile phone market is hot, and even Apple is forced to reduce prices in China, and Lenovo's situation is becoming more and more difficult.
Entering 2020, under the influence of the epidemic, Lenovo's business was once shut down. Yang Yuanqing once mentioned that at that time, Lenovo's most important smart phone production base was located in Wuhan, and in the first quarter of 2020, it was basically in a state of suspension, and Lenovo used its factories in India and Brazil to produce and deliver 6 million smart phones.
Lenovo mobile phone factory in Wuhan, photo/Lenovo official website
After repeated reform adjustments and dying struggles, there is still no position for Lenovo mobile phones in the market.
According to a report by Strategy Analytics, the top five apples, honors, OPPO, vivo, and millet account for more than 85% of the global market in 2021. Shipments of the rest of the "Others," including Lenovo, fell 16 percent year-over-year.
The head effect in the Chinese market is more obvious, and the living space of small and medium-sized mobile phone manufacturers is getting narrower and narrower.
Lenovo has turned its attention to overseas markets. As early as 2015, Yang Yuanqing mentioned that China's smartphone market is very unhealthy, and the primary target of Lenovo's mobile business is overseas. In 2020, it once again mentioned that Lenovo should focus on profitable markets such as North America and Latin America.
In the overseas mobile phone market, Lenovo is living well.
With the influence of Motorola, Lenovo has gained a lot of market share in the United States. According to Counterpoint data, as of the fourth quarter of 2021, in the ranking of U.S. smartphone shipments, Apple and Samsung ranked in the top two with a market share of 47% and 34%, respectively, and Lenovo ranked third with a market share of 12%.
In addition, Lenovo's mobile phone share in the Latin American market is second only to Samsung, ranking third in North America; and it is also expanding into Europe, the Middle East, Africa and other markets.
In overseas markets, Lenovo's PC business has accumulated more efficient supply chain and procurement negotiation capabilities, which makes it easier for Lenovo mobile phones to go overseas.
However, with the gradual defeat of Huawei because of the ban, the overseas mobile phone market has also ushered in a reshuffle, and Xiaomi OV is also doing its best to compete, and there are still large variables in this market.
For Lenovo mobile phones, overseas battles are difficult to fight, and it is even more difficult to rely on overseas counter-offensives at home.
With the mainstream market being occupied and the market segment being robbed, the possibility of Lenovo mobile phones trying to find a way out in the domestic mobile phone market will only become smaller and smaller.