The mountains that were once insurmountable are being trampled under the feet of OPPO, who "seeks change".
”
Author | Liang Yong
Edit | Wang Yafeng
"On December 19, 2021, OPPO CEO Chen Mingyong was drunk in Shenzhen Bay, which should be Chen Mingyong's happiest in several years."
According to the description of witnesses, after the OPPO Future Science and Technology Conference, Chen Mingyong held a celebration banquet in Chunsun.
The semi-retired OPPO elder Jin Leqin, as well as Chen Mingyong's two generals Liu Zuohu and Liu Jun, also attended, standing next to Chen Mingyong, holding up their wine glasses and drinking with Hong Liang.
The banquet celebrated the three project teams of Find N folding screen mobile phones, MariSilicon X self-developed chips and Air Glass AR glasses.
Behind the ecstasy, Chen Mingyong's happiness was indeed not easy.
On the one hand, the impact of high-end dreams, finally see opportunities in the Find N folding screen mobile phone and MariSilicon X self-developed chip;
On the other hand, what had worried Chen Mingyong was whether Liu Zuohu and Liu Jun, the right and left arms, could let down their guard and produce a chemical reaction. In the end, the Find N and Air Glass were successfully launched, announcing that they would be reconciled.
More importantly, Chen Mingyong, who is actively seeking change, is well aware of the shortcomings in OPPO's business model and has been trying to change.
In the years of business adjustment and personnel layout, he finally had the opportunity to promote OPPO to complete a crucial transformation through follow-up up and upcoming listings under the potential premise of standing firm in the high-end market and "will be harmonious".
Chen Mingyong, who is about to turn 53, is crossing hills.
1
Offline channel providers: OPPO's benefactors and enemies
In the process of operation, the most powerful part of the enterprise often grows a fatal weakness: vested interests are like hounds to protect food, hostile to innovative forces, and snuff out the flame of internal change.
To some extent, oppo's vested interests and benefactors are the same person, that is, offline channel providers.
After enjoying the channel dividend for more than 20 years, the former benefactor sometimes seems to be a stumbling block for OPPO to enter the high-end road.
This was the first hill that Chen Mingyong had to cross.
On the first working day of the beginning of 2021, Chen Mingyong released a New Year's speech with the theme of "Breaking the High-end".
This year's OPPO has been extremely hard and impacting the high-end mobile phone market.
On the surface, it is an impact on the high-end, but at a deep level, it is a concentrated embodiment of its active change in business models and organizational methods.
The most effective way to play is failing
2016 was the highlight of OPPO's past channels and models.
In that year, OPPO shipments reached 78.4 million units (IDC data), an increase of 122.2% year-on-year, ranking first in the Chinese market – it is worth mentioning that vivo, which adopted a similar model, also increased by 96.9% year-on-year.
However, after the dividends of offline channels were exhausted, in 2017, the situation changed significantly.
In 2017, Huawei quickly replaced OPPO as the leader of China's smartphone market, while OPPO's shipments increased by only 1.7% that year, and even saw a sharp decline of 18.5% in the fourth quarter.
Not only that, with the performance of the Mate 10 series, Huawei's share in the high-end market has soared by 400% year-on-year, becoming a strong competitor to Apple.
Obviously, the move of "fashion advertising + offline channels" that OPPO relied on in the past did not work.
For this trend, OPPO also sees it very clearly, and begins to actively lay out the high-end, and hopes to seal the throat with a sword.
As a result, in June 2018, four years after the Break of the Find series, The Find X was released at the Louvre in Paris.
Through the mechanical mechanism, it has achieved a full screen of up to 93.8%, known as "breaking through the highest screen ratio in history", and in terms of sensors, it has also ventured to cooperate with Obi Zhongguang to choose 3D structured light, and it is also constantly stacking materials in terms of processors, cameras, charging, etc., with the purpose of creating a stunning work.
However, it turned out later that the Find X, which started at 4999 yuan, became a product that was "applauded but not popular".
According to W, who has long been engaged in the smartphone industry, told Leifeng Network that Find X is an ambitious and even amazing product, and has also made differentiation, but the fundamental reason for its failure is to step on the wrong industry and technology trends, such as the mechanical structure it uses in 2018, which was briefly fired in 2018, but was quickly abandoned in 2019; and the 3D structured light it used later disappeared in the Android camp.
The Later Release of the Find X2 and Find X3 Series did not perform well.
Although it continues to lose, for Chen Mingyong, hitting the high-end is a road that cannot be turned back and must be adhered to, which is not only the key for OPPO to maintain competitiveness in the mobile phone market in the future.
But more importantly, OPPO has formed a fixed set of organization and operation methods in the brilliant achievements shaped by the early development of the smartphone business. But after 2018, this set of organization and operation methods has already hindered the development of OPPO.
Strong offline channel providers, let OPPO trapped in the "product cocoon"
We know that the information cocoon refers to the information that people pay attention to, guided by their own interests, so that they shackle their lives to the "cocoon" like a cocoon, and only receive content that makes them happy.
Living in an information cocoon for a long time, its way of thinking will inevitably think of its own prejudices as the truth, thus rejecting the intrusion of other reasonable views.
OPPO was once trapped in the product cocoon, rejecting many innovations.
Because the main battlefield of sales comes from offline channel providers, when new products are cultivated by channel providers for many years and have been solidified, there is a mismatch, and new products are difficult to sell.
OPPO is naturally also aware that the products that are difficult to break through in the inherent sales system offline do not necessarily have no opportunities online.
However, when they want to build an online sales system and jump out of the offline shackles, the channel providers have restrained OPPO's online actions on the grounds of affecting their interests.
This makes OPPO's new product design for a period of time more to meet the needs of channel users, rather than the groups they really want to reach. Eventually fell into the product cocoon built by offline channel providers, unable to break the situation.
A management who once worked at OPPO told Lei Feng that oppo in the long-term offline channel layout, its target user group has long targeted the user group of users over 30 years old in third- to sixth-tier cities, and such users often use the R series at the beginning, and later convert to the Reno or Find series, which is very loyal - but the problem is that this method cannot effectively obtain a large number of new users or new traffic, resulting in a very low proportion of user traffic from other brands.
The strength of offline channels does indeed limit the expansion of OPPO's online channels. Due to the different nature of channels and large cost differences, online and offline channels have a very obvious competitive relationship, so OPPO has ushered in the resistance of many offline dealers in the development of online channels such as e-commerce - which seriously limits the growth of OPPO online channels and makes it difficult to obtain new users.
According to a high-level oppo departing employee, "e-commerce is actually a failure."
OPPO for channel providers: deep interest binding, management can not be scientific
In fact, in response to the problem of online channels being suppressed, Chen Mingyong has long been aware of it and has also given corresponding countermeasures.
For example, when he first let Liu Zuohu leave OPPO to create OnePlus, in fact, the original purpose was to take the online channel, but later one plus had problems in products and channels, only to change to a flagship strategy, and then because OPPO wanted to impact the high-end, OnePlus was taken back by Chen Mingyong.
In addition to OnePlus, Chen Mingyong also played a second card, that is, the 2018 independent Realme. After Realme became independent from OPPO, it also continued to benchmark Redmi and returned to the Chinese market in 2019, also in order to seize the online market - but Realme's problem is that although it has gone, its profits are very thin and it has not made any money.
The dependence on offline channels has actually greatly affected the evolution process of OPPO's product line, especially at the level of product exploration to the high-end.
Due to the long-term market inertia and OPPO's own lack of product strength when it hits the high-end, offline dealers are actually more enthusiastic about selling the R series and later the Reno series.
It is precisely because of this that after experiencing adjustments and trial and error in 2019, the Reno series finally had to return to the old model of "high value + advertising bombardment + dealer promotion" adopted by the previous R series, and this model did help OPPO successfully return in sales after the Reno 5 series.
But the problem is that the re-operation of this model means that the Find series, which lacks product differentiation and is not good enough in technical strength, is not easy to sell offline, and dealers do not have enough motivation to push - therefore, in the case of OPPO technology and product potential, offline channels have not played a big role in the process of OPPO impacting the high-end, but to some extent formed an obstacle.
In addition, for oppo's long-term business development, in addition to relying on mobile phone hardware business to make money, it also needs to vigorously develop the Internet and service-related business with mobile phones as the entrance, so the expansion of new users and new traffic is very critical - this is the future of money, but it is not consistent with the interests of dealers, so under the existing offline dealer-led model, the Internet business has actually been hindered.
S, who once worked at OPPO, told Lei Feng that OPPO has more than 200,000 stores in the country, and at least 200,000 or 300,000 people eat by selling OPPO mobile phones, and the bosses in these agents existed in the BBK era 20 years ago, and OPPO did a lifetime of business, and also made a lot of money with OPPO, and even "in a sense OPPO is to work for agents."
S believes that for OPPO, offline channels are actually heavy assets, and when the product is consistently competitive enough, it can continue to rotate; however, the problem is that once it is to be transformed, these heavy assets will actually easily cause huge resistance.
But for the sake of OPPO's long-term plan, Chen Mingyong has no choice, can only be in the balance of different interests in the multi-line layout, on the one hand, after the toss to stabilize reno this basic disk, on the one hand, with Realme to attack the online market, while knowing that it will lose money to continue to force the high-end market, and slowly return one plus to concentrate resources and reduce the inner volume - this process for Chen Mingyong, must be torturous, but also he must go through.
It is also worth noting that many oppo's large agents are actually shareholders of OPPO, and they are not only bound by interests with OPPO, but even in many cases can indirectly influence the company's decision-making through equity or relationship with Chen Mingyong himself or even Duan Yongping, which has led to oppo's decision-making and management not being formalized and scientific.
How can OPPO break through the cocoon?
The answer may be IPO, which exposes itself to the public and all shareholders with the help of listing, forcing the transparency of corporate decision-making and the scientific governance of corporate governance.
In October 2021, OPPO issued an internal letter entitled "Future-Oriented, Value-Creation, Tony On Comprehensive Compensation Change", which said that OPPO will change the compensation mechanism used for several years, introducing "performance shares" in the composition of employee compensation, especially for employees above the middle level, and stocks will become an important part of their compensation.
In the interpretation of the outside world, this action is believed that OPPO has planned to go public.
OPPO listing is becoming a long-term choice for Chen Yongming to solve the high-end dilemma.
Listing, for many entrepreneurs, is a financial stage of relief, and for Chen Yongming, it is to bid farewell to the shackles of the past 20 years and break free from the product cocoon.
2
OPPO, OnePlus Conflict,
Liu Zuohu and Liu Jun's generals were reconciled
If the conflict between the interests of the channel provider and the company's strategy is attributed to external factors.
The internal factor that restricts the high-end of OPPO is the conflict between organizational factions, the conflict between open culture and conservative culture.
The only person who can extinguish the fire of conflict is still Chen Mingyong.
Chen Mingyong has always been known in the industry for his low-key nature, but in fact, his sense of enterprising and future consciousness is very strong, and he is also extremely diligent, dares to change, and has the aesthetic level of an artist.
According to the evaluation of many industry people who have talked to Chen Mingyong in person, Chen Mingyong is indeed "heroic" in terms of ideas and goals.
But a big company, just the boss level to stand high, see far is not enough, in the process of achieving specific goals, he also needs to have a brave and good general, as well as a strong organization - these are the problems that Chen Mingyong has to solve, in fact, he has been trying to solve.
Among them, Chen Mingyong wants to solve a primary crux of the dilemma of OPPO mobile phones impacting the high-end. After all, after the Find X debuted in 2018, it broke off in the year of 5G nodes in 2019 (breaking more can be said to be a taboo for mobile phones to stand on the high end); and the fiasco of the Find X2 in terms of products, pricing and final sales in 2020 is obvious.
In this case, Chen Mingyong had enough ideas and motivation to make a difficult but necessary decision: please ask Liu Zuohu and OnePlus to come back.
Liu Zuohu brought one plus talent back to OPPO
In the public eye, Liu Zuohu returned to OPPO as the CEO of OnePlus in June 2020 as the chief product experience officer, and then officially announced that he was the senior vice president of Oujia Holdings in September. However, according to H, a person close to Liu Zuohu, in fact, Liu Zuohu had already returned to OPPO in 2019, but at that time he still put more energy on one plus; later returned to OPPO in 2020.
Finally, in June 2021, Liu Zuohu announced the merger of OnePlus into OPPO, which was actually almost complete.
According to H, the merger of OnePlus by OPPO is entirely Chen Mingyong's personal opinion, because he is very worried about the problem of OPPO, hoping to use the advantages of OnePlus through the merger and do high-end - after all, compared to OPPO, OnePlus is more open and inclusive in culture, mainly to do things, there is no PPT culture, the internal organization is also more transparent and open, and it is very concerned about user experience and details, which are exactly what OPPO lacks.
In terms of business participation, after the return, Liu Zuohu has only promoted OnePlus products on Weibo, and did not stand for it until the release of the Find N folding screen mobile phone. But Liu Zuohu, who is obsessed with products, is deeply involved in the product definition of the Find X3 series, and the "Crater Image Mirror Group" behind this product is his handwriting - the problem is that relying solely on the improvement of product power is limited for the support of impacting the high-end, and the impact of the high-end requires the accumulation of time, and the process is not achieved overnight.
However, according to Lei Feng, at the beginning of 2021, Liu Zuohu has signed a military order within OPPO, with the specific goal: within three years, OPPO will achieve the first in China and the top three in the world in word of mouth, and the more specific quantitative evaluation criterion is NPS (net recommendation value, Net Promoter Score, one of the main assessment indicators of enterprise product experience).
In fact, in the process of integrating into OPPO, OnePlus inevitably encountered the problem of organizational integration.
Side effect of OnePlus incorporating INTO OPPO: Conflict formation
The integration of organizations has always been the most difficult problem in management practice, and no enterprise can avoid it.
OPPO and OnePlus have naturally become one of thousands of cases.
According to H, the merger with OnePlus is dominated by OPPO, but this merger has many problems, at first everyone felt that it existed independently, and as a result, after merging, a large number of organizational teams were dismantled and disrupted, even the very powerful OnePlus overseas team, "said that the merger was merged" - this is an erosion of OnePlus's international tone, which is a pity.
In addition, after the merger, OnePlus's Internet business has also been integrated with OPPO, engaging in the so-called "three-network integration", that is, do not do it separately, but OPPO / one plus / Realme, three families with the same set, and even threatened to do AWS when meeting internally, it is "relatively virtual".
As a result, many of the original one-plus excellent employees chose to leave before and after the merger, including several of one-plus co-founders and management teams, because they felt that OPPO's "this culture is not very liked."
Of course, as a member of the concubine army brought out by Chen Mingyong in his early years, Liu Zuohu himself is still relatively open, and there are many insistences on products in his heart, under the call of Chen Mingyong, he still chooses to return to OPPO to take charge of the entire product system.
However, integration is difficult after all, an unconfirmed paragraph is: after Liu Zuohu's return, there is a product plan to make decisions, and three programs are given internally, the first two programs are from the original OPPO team, the third is from the original OnePlus team, and Liu Zuohu killed the first two when making decisions, and finally chose the original one Plus product team's plan.
After Liu Zuohu returned to OPPO, he actually had to face another problem. After all, since he left OPPO at the end of 2013 to found OnePlus, although he was also under Chen Mingyong and seemed to belong to the OPPO department in the outside world, he did not participate in the process of OPPO to glory in 2015/2016, although OnePlus insisted on being a flagship and did stand on high-end mobile phones, but this still caused him to parachute back in 2020 as senior vice president of Oujia Holdings, which also caused some doubts.
In addition, it is worth mentioning that after Liu Zuohu returned to OPPO, he actually formed a confrontation relationship with Liu Jun, another senior vice president and CTO who was originally responsible for product research and development.
Chen Mingyong, a master of interpersonal integration
According to people familiar with the matter, Liu Zuohu and Liu Jun are not antagonistic, and both of them belong to the generals of the Xiongcai general style, they are very firm and have ideas, but in a certain period of time, the direct communication between the two is not too much, but it is the brothers below who pull through. And a company's CPO and CTO do not communicate, which can easily lead to a lot of problems.
Therefore, for Chen Mingyong, promoting Liu Jun and Liu Zuohu to work closely together at the technical and product levels, that is, "will be harmonious", has become a key issue that he is bound to solve - and from the perspective of the future science and technology conference, Chen Mingyong has made a good breakthrough in the matter of the two "will be harmonious".
For example, the Find N folding screen mobile phone, this product is the first product that Liu Zuohu is responsible for after returning to OPPO, but it is also obviously the result of the cooperation of the technical and product teams, in which the hinge design in this product is independently developed by OPPO, with 125 patents and 136 parts - it is difficult to imagine that products such as Find N are not the result of close communication between product and technology bosses.
In addition, according to people familiar with the matter told Lei Feng Network, OPPO in the middle of 2021 will be independent of the IoT business from the negative profit and loss, is currently considering the IoT business revenue and OPPO Research Institute binding, which means that the research institute may also need to undertake the revenue task - the logic here may be to promote the collaboration between the research institute and the product business department.
In fact, in the process of creating OPPO Air Glass, the members of the project have reported to Liu Zuohu many times, which is essentially the logic of making mass production products, not just a concept.
Of course, from the perspective of the celebration banquet, the reason why Chen Mingyong is so happy is actually after four years of painful changes, and finally saw the results: MariSilicon X self-developed chip laid a foundation for next year's Find X new products, and it is also an important opportunity for the combination of technology and products; the pricing and order performance of the Find N folding screen also gave dealers confidence and imagination space, and won recognition for the listing plan.
More importantly, Liu Zuohu's further integration into OPPO has borne fruit, and the cooperative relationship between him and Liu Jun is being established – which is exactly what Chen Mingyong hopes to see.
3
In Huawei's way, counter Huawei
Let the technology bloom in the product, Chen Mingyong killed two birds with one stone: not only narrowed the collaborative relationship between the two Liu, but also took an important step in the integration of production and research at the high end.
Chen Mingyong's radical investment in research and development has been sparing no effort.
Chen Mingyong's determination to invest in research and development was the opportunity for him to return from the United States at the end of 2017, and after returning, he found that Huawei's momentum was very strong, and the original playing style was not suitable for the new industry development situation, and decided to invest heavily in research and development, in the way of Huawei, to compete with Huawei and other manufacturers.
A concrete result that soon followed was the official establishment of the OPPO Research Institute in April 2018, with the aim of laying out new investments in the future in addition to OPPO's existing R&D system; and on the day of the establishment of the Institute, Chen Mingyong also came to personally stand on the platform.
From the perspective of business ownership, OPPO Research Institute is directly managed by Liu Jun, senior vice president who plays the role of CTO.
According to the article "The Godfather of Mobile Phones, Born in 1969", Liu Jun is an OPPO veteran who has worked with Chen Mingyong for more than 20 years, he joined OPPO in 2001 after graduating from college, he undertook the task of building a mobile phone team in the early days of OPPO's entry into the mobile phone industry, and later in oppo transformed smart phones when he was in charge of product research and development, made the world's thinnest mobile phone Finder at that time, and later he also cooperated with Shunyu and others to carry out 5x zoom research and development - therefore When the OPPO Research Institute was established, it was logical for him to take the helm.
OPPO's "10 billion subsidies"
In November 2018, more than half a year after the establishment of the OPPO Research Institute, Chen Mingyong participated in an internal-oriented science and technology exhibition held in the name of the OPPO Research Institute, during which he announced that the investment in OPPO's research and development funds increased from 4 billion yuan in the current year to 10 billion yuan the following year, and will increase investment year by year; at this science and technology exhibition, in addition to Chen Mingyong's platform, three vice presidents from the software engineering division, the new mobile terminal division and the research institute also appeared.
Obviously, these three departments have become the main departments of OPPO's strong investment in research and development; among them, software engineering has become the focus of investment due to its close integration with cutting-edge technologies such as AI, big data, and cloud computing.
Under the R&D budget of 10 billion, 2019 has become a year of crazy expansion of OPPO R&D related personnel, and it is also a year of OPPO's organizational expansion. From the public information, Chen Mingyong announced at the Reno conference in April of that year that the R & D team should exceed 10,000 people; as a result, 8 months later, OPPO vice president Liu Chang revealed in an interview with OPPO's first future science and technology conference at the end of the year that the largest investment in 10 billion yuan of research and development funds was the introduction of talents, and at that time, OPPO's R & D personnel had grown to nearly 10,000 people, almost double the five or six thousand people in the previous year.
Not only that, at the first OPPO Future Technology Conference in 2019, which evolved from the "Science and Technology Exhibition", Chen Mingyong further announced that OPPO will invest 50 billion yuan in research and development budgets in the next three years, mainly in 5G/6G, artificial intelligence, AR, big data and other cutting-edge technology fields to build the underlying hardware core technology and software engineering and system capabilities.
In fact, under the higher R& D investment budget, the underlying hardware technology here has pointed to the chip, and it is Liu Jun who proposes to invest in chip research and development.
In 2020, OPPO's R&D team continued to expand, and by March the Find X2 series had exceeded 10,000. In the introduction of talents, in addition to software, cloud computing, AI, IoT and other teams continue to recruit people, OPPO also specially introduced Zhu Shangzu and other gods in the chip field, committed to self-developed chip development - this team has developed to this day, has reached thousands of people, the release of MariSilicon X is also due to this, it can be seen that Chen Mingyong's persistence and long-termism, or there is a return.
However, from the overall point of view, in the process of a large expansion of R & D personnel and organizations, OPPO has also had many problems.
OPPO's "Genghis Khan Disease": Management can't keep up with expansion
Q, an industry person who once held a management position in OPPO, told Lei Feng that when he first joined OPPO, he met a post-90s person who had been recruited by the school when he was in another giant company, and when the two exchanged, Q learned: the other party only brought 50 people at the earliest, and after a year, the team expanded with 150 people, and then brought 300 people; Q asked the other party to bring 300 people to get it, he admitted that he couldn't do it, but there was no way, because "the boss said you can do it, you have to be on top", this is in OPPO Known as the so-called "running on the job" of young people , S also stressed that this situation is not unique at OPPO.
Q believes that at that time, in the expansion of OPPO's research and development numbers, OPPO actually did not master a set of corresponding collaboration problems, which is a science, not a rich pile of people can do it; but at that time, OPPO's main practice was to pile up people, and did not pay attention to the introduction of management cadres and professional managers, but was more inclined to promote internal post-90s young people as ministers, but in fact, they did not necessarily have the corresponding management capabilities. This will inevitably lead to the problem of R&D efficiency and management capabilities not keeping up.
At the same time, in the expansion of R & D personnel, OPPO also has the problem of multi-headed work and distraction.
For example, in OPPO's research and development system, self-developed chips are a relatively independent system, OPPO Research Institute is responsible for the research and development of cutting-edge products such as AR glasses, and there is also its own special research and development team in the mobile phone department, and IoT also has its own special development team - In addition, in software engineering, Internet business and corresponding overseas business research and development, it is also its own faction. In this way, although it has the advantages of multi-line operations, it is not conducive to OPPO's technical management in terms of organizational structure, which is easy to cause personnel redundancy and low efficiency.
Reflected in the overall management, that is, the system ability of the entire OPPO is relatively weak.
Of course, for this issue, Chen Mingyong is not unaware, but attaches great importance to it.
In fact, after establishing the strategy of technology investment, OPPO has also spent a lot of effort to dig up a lot of Huawei people, trying to learn Huawei's set of processes and systems; even OPPO has found a consulting company similar to IBM to try to get it to help optimize processes based on Western management related theories - even Chen Mingyong himself has a team of more than 200 consultants, half of which are Huawei.
However, according to Q evaluation, despite the above actions, from the result point of view, after tossing back and forth, OPPO's improvement effect on the process and system is not large, "even only makes the efficiency become lower", the reason is that "the organizational ability is not in place". In Q's view, oppo in the rapid growth of the team, did not grow a set of effective system suitable for itself within the organization, but "regularly look for foreign monks to chant", the result was found to be inappropriate, after paying millions of consulting fees, and then another consulting company came, but in the end it could not solve the problem.
An employee who once worked at OPPO commented that OPPO especially likes to learn from Huawei, but it is not like learning, not learning in its entirety, and it is a bit of a tiger painting cat feeling.
Q said that this eventually led to the system can not retain particularly good technical personnel, even if it is to throw money to recruit some excellent talents, these people can not stay, because for people who do technology, the environment is very important, Q even commented, "OPPO's environment is really a reverse elimination."
In such a situation, OPPO in the 2021 mobile phone industry is not very good situation began to reflect, in addition to the self-developed chip team is still continuing to recruit, many other departments have carried out a large layoffs, of which poor profitability of the IoT department, over-inflated software engineering department, etc. have become the hardest hit areas of layoffs; in addition, OPPO mobile phone department, OPPO research institute recruitment quota, "basically stuck."
Despite the many disappointments, in any case, 2021 is a year between gains and losses for OPPO.
4
Ups and downs of 2021: between gains and losses
In the development of OPPO, the low-key Chen Mingyong rarely came forward to speak out for a product.
However, on the first working day of the beginning of 2021, he specifically emphasized that the Find series is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and Find X3 will become the "pioneering work" of oppo's strong breakthrough of the brand, and it is also OPPO's "ten-year ideal work".
Chen Mingyong undoubtedly has high hopes for the Find X3 series to impact the high-end market, and he hopes that the Find X3 can sweep away the haze of the loss of the Find X2 series and help OPPO occupy a place in China's high-end smartphone market in 2021.
In fact, given the external market environment at the time, this hope was quite reasonable.
After all, huawei in June 2020 by the United States after another round of sanctions, released a huge market space, especially in the high-end market, Huawei and Apple double male dominance of the situation was broken - after Huawei fell, other players want to seize the opportunity in 2021 to seize the high-end mobile phone market space left by Huawei, OPPO is naturally no exception.
Based on this background, OPPO has done enough for the Find X3 series.
Judging from the launch three months later, the debut of the Find X3 series can be described as gorgeous. OPPO Global Marketing President Liu Lie appeared as the keynote speaker, and the symphony orchestra was also used on the spot, which set off a full futuristic atmosphere for the conference by playing the music composed by the film score master Hans Zimmer. In addition, in terms of product promotion, the Find X3 series has also been defined as "the ideal work for the tenth anniversary of OPPO Find".
Later facts proved that after the absence of Huawei in the high-end market, Apple became the biggest winner, and the Find X3 series launched by OPPO did not help it seize the share of the high-end mobile phone market - not only that, the OPPO Find X3 series also formed a competitive relationship with the one-plus 9 series launched that month, which was quite internal.
For the performance of the Find X3 series, OPPO has also been reviewed internally, a typical reason is that not enough product differentiation has been made, the operating system is based on Android, and the processors are Qualcomm, so OPPO can only work the external industrial design, but this is not enough to support product differentiation.
Not only that, but the Find X3 series is actually rolled into the Reno series, OPPO's main shipping line. For example, the Reno 6 series "super cup" Reno 6 Pro uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 processor, but in fact, this processor is actually installed in the OPPO Find X3, which is positioned as a high-end model, and the two are also a bit of a fight in product positioning.
To the Reno 7 series, OPPO directly cut the Pro+ "super cup", but instead positioned the product down, launched the Reno 7 SE "small cup", obviously for the sake of rapid volume and made adjustments, but also OPPO in order to make up for the Find X3 series to impact the high-end failure and make up for the channel to make up for the loss of the channel.
According to industry insiders, in 2021, OPPO lost its strategy of impacting the high-end, resulting in a large number of its channel providers losing money, and its proportion even exceeded 70% - many of which are both OPPO and vivo channel providers also choose to push vivo, which also affects OPPO's mobile phone market in 2021 to a certain extent.
It is worth noting that in addition to the mobile phone business, the development of OPPO IoT business has not met expectations, and there has been a serious loss in revenue, for this reason, OPPO has also made adjustments in 2021, splitting the IoT business segment and taking responsibility for its own profit and loss - with this change, the OPPO IoT business segment has gone a lot of people.
But fortunately, despite a series of ups and downs in 2021, OPPO's years of investment in high-end mobile phones and underlying research and development continue, and bear fruit at the Future Tech Conference at the end of 2021.
From the results, OPPO's first self-developed chip MariSilicon X, which has been developed for many years, was finally released, which as an image-specific NPU, adopts TSMC's 6nm process, and the AI computing power even exceeds Apple's A15 Bionic, winning universal praise and laying the foundation for the latest Find X 5 flagship.
At the same time, the debut of OPPO Find N folding screen mobile phone has become the final work of OPPO to hit the high-end in 2021, and the price of 7699 has greatly enhanced its product competitiveness.
Judging from internal feedback, OPPO Find N's order volume far exceeded expectations, which made Chen Mingyong very happy, and he also asked the software leader to develop an invitation code system next week at the celebration banquet. What has attracted attention is that the release of OPPO Find N is also the first time that Liu Zuohu appeared at an OPPO product conference after his return to OPPO.
In addition, OPPO has also launched a new AR glasses Air Glass. It has many highlights in products, such as the 30g body, the Micro LED used in the screen - but this product is not only to show the technology, it also has mass production considerations.
In any case, through the future technology conference at the end of the year, OPPO really shows its determination and strength in impacting the high-end of the mobile phone market and continuing to invest in technology research and development. Judging from the situation of the celebration banquet, Chen Mingyong was satisfied with the current stage results.
5
Chen Mingyong who crosses all the hills
For OPPO, 2021 as a whole is not a particularly smooth one, with a lot of turbulence and adjustment pains, but in the end it can be said to be a year with hope and the future.
Among them, Chen Mingyong is the trader who actively seeks change, but this process has lasted for four years.
In the past four years, he needs to cross multiple hills: get rid of the constraints of channels and move towards the kangzhuang road of R&D and innovation; hit the high-end while maintaining the basic disk of the channel in the process; to strengthen and consolidate the previous technology research and development system, while solving the problem of organizational expansion; to integrate Liu Zuohu and his team into the OPPO system to play a product and organizational role, and at the same time to let him form a close cooperative relationship with the technical team led by Liu Jun. In addition, there are many issues such as cutting-edge technology research and development, salary distribution system, organizational culture change, and listing.
At the same time, from an external point of view, OPPO also needs to achieve internal changes while constantly dealing with competition and challenges from external markets and changes in technology trends - especially in the treacherous and hellishly competitive Chinese smartphone market, even a little mistake can easily cause very serious consequences.
Under such internal and external factors, OPPO's active change in the past four years is tantamount to "changing the engine on the highway".
Among them, OPPO has experienced conflicts, adjustments and even continuous tossing and turning in the business line, experienced rapid expansion and rapid contraction of the R & D team, experienced repeated learning from the organization but achieved little effect, experienced its integration with the two brands of OnePlus and Reamle, and the resulting integration dilemma and even brain drain - but it is undeniable that Chen Mingyong's determination to change is firm, the understanding and investment of technology is enough, and the enthusiasm and courage to deal with the crisis are enough. Only then did he get drunk at the celebration feast.
Of course, for Chen Mingyong and OPPO, whether it is to stand firm in the high-end mobile phone market, or to establish core technology and competitiveness through self-developed chips, as well as OPPO listing, organizational culture change, and even other more ambitious products and corporate goals, everything that happens in front of us can only be regarded as a time, and it is still far from completion.
These are the hills that Chen Mingyong must lead OPPO over, and it is "a mountain is higher than a mountain" - but Chen Mingyong can never stop, can only continue to climb upwards.
END